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| 1 |
ID:
144955
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Caspian Sea has suddenly come into focus, drawing the attention of not only the five littoral states and oil and gas producers, but also the political and military actors involved in the Syrian conflict. On October 7, 2017, Russia's Caspian Flotilla fired Kalibr cruise missiles at Islamic State targets, demonstrating the high efficiency of its precision weapons, and ability to deliver strikes in remote areas using a limited task force that the West had not taken seriously before. The redeployment of troops to Syria and the use of Caspian Flotilla ships clearly showed that Russia could promptly come to consensus with its neighbors in the region-Azerbaijan, Iran, and Iraq.
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| 2 |
ID:
138343
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| Summary/Abstract |
The two studies under review, by Matthew Levitt and Lina Khatib et al., present very different pictures of Hezbollah, pictures which are not necessarily conflicting and are indeed, in many ways, complementary. Levitt focuses on the group's long record of terrorism dating back more than 30 years to the early 1980s and its violent attacks on US marines and French forces then based in Lebanon. Over that period, of course, as Lina Khatib and her co-authors demonstrate, Hezbollah has grown in stature as a political party. Khatib and her colleagues portray a party that has deliberately sought to keep Lebanon a weak and divided country, despite the efforts of the West and Gulf Arab states to strengthen the Lebanese state. These two studies add immensely to our knowledge of Hezbollah and its extraordinary rise over the past three decades to become one of the major political and military actors in the Middle East.
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