How to Warm the Cold Peace Between Egypt and Israel
As the Trump administration considers its Middle East peace strategy, one target should be a deeper relationship between the Arab world’s most populous nation and the Jewish state, one that advances beyond diplomatic formalities to include greater economic cooperation and cultural exchanges. Since the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Cairo and Jerusalem have […]
To Lock in Middle East Security, Up the Game
President Trump will be traveling to the Middle East at a time of great progress, given the terrible defeat Iran has suffered over the past eighteen months at the hands of exactly the regional alliance Trump is seeking now to further strengthen. Nevertheless, more work is needed on the three most pressing remaining Iran-related issues, […]
The Middle East As Informational Battlefield
Once upon a time, the Middle Eastern media environment was predictable and staid, dominated by a few prominent outlets that in Arab countries were often owned and operated by the governments’ information ministries. No longer. Over the past three decades, the region has witnessed an explosion in information and connectivity. In the 1990s and 2000s, […]
With Renewed Crisis in the Middle East, Who is Watching the Indo-Pacific?
In October 2023, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels began attacking civilian and military shipping in the Red Sea between the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The impact on global trade has cost consumers world-wide billions of dollars, as ships avoid the Red Sea and transit instead around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. In […]
A Cold Peace in Peril?
Israel-Egypt peace was carefully constructed in the 1979 treaty and has weathered numerous regional storms: the 1982 Lebanon War, two Palestinian intifadas, the upheaval of the 2011 Arab Spring, and even sixteen months of conflict in Gaza. Throughout, Israel and Egypt have sustained generally productive military and economic cooperation (despite persistent anti-Israeli sentiment in the […]
Fighting the Information War in the Middle East, One Case at a Time
The Islamist terrorist armies – Hamas, Hizbullah, Ansarallah (the Houthis) – and their backers are not able to win wars against the US allies in the Middle East. But they are able to win information campaigns. In so doing, they can influence and prepare Middle Eastern publics for future rounds of conflict. The Arabic media […]
A Middle East Strategy for the Trump Administration Should Lead with Business Opportunities
The Middle East that awaits a second Trump administration offers unusual opportunity. The US can double down on two major successes – Israel’s war against Iran’s proxy armies and the Abraham Accords peace deal – to expand its regional alliance. At the end of the first Trump administration, the Abraham Accords expanded the alliance at […]
With Assad Gone - What’s Next?
The fall of the Assad regime is the greatest event of the war over the past year, although the Syrian army itself did not take part in the fighting. The ring of fire that Iran had planned to establish around Israel has been dismantled with the loss of the single most important link in the […]
Trump Administration Faces a Suddenly Promising Middle East
BACKGROUND The second Trump administration will face immediate foreign policy dilemmas in all three Eurasian fronts. This paper concentrates on the Middle East, but the competing demands of Europe and East Asia, and the links among all of them, influence decisions everywhere. The dramatic events of the past year open the door to a regional […]
The Impact of Trump’s Election on The Middle East
The landslide election of Donald Trump’s holds out real promise of encouraging peace in the Middle East. Unlike President Biden, who demanded caution from Israel in exchange for providing arms, Trump seems to be sending a message that he will support Israel’s policy of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if that requires military […]
The Failure of the "Economic Peace" Model in the Middle East
On September 26, 2021, Israel’s then Prime Minister Naftali Bennet took the podium at the UN General Assembly and laid out a grand vision for the Middle East. It was a modernist, advanced, technological future (as befitted Bennet, a former high-tech entrepreneur) in which Israel would play a major role – focused upon a world […]
The Day After Tomorrow:
Dark Clouds Loom over the Middle East
Dark Clouds Loom over the Middle East
In one of his last interviews on German television, before passing at the age of 100, Henry Kissinger opined that the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas on October 7 could end up bringing the rest of the Arab world into the fighting. Based on recent events, his remarks were prophetic. Unless cooler heads prevail, we […]
