Japan has been telegraphing its concerns to the United States about the potential impacts of the Trump administration’s decision last month to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. One Japanese official recently acknowledged Tokyo’s anxieties that it may be forced to cut off Iranian oil imports, which have resumed after the nuclear agreement was inked in 2015 and currently total some 170,000 barrels per day. An official from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry recently indicated Tokyo does not want that to change and hopes for an exemption from sanctions the U.S. is preparing to impose again on [...]
It has become conventional wisdom that the Middle East’s popular uprisings of 2011 failed, and that the prospects for true democracy in the region are dim for the foreseeable future. The return of authoritarian leadership in Egypt is the most dramatic reversal of the Arab Spring, but one can also look to Yemen, where a shaky political transition later plunged the country back into civil war, or of course Syria, where the early days of peaceful protest, brutally repressed by the Assad regime, seem like a distant memory in the ongoing civil war. There is occasional turbulence in Morocco, too, [...]
In recent days, the war in Yemen has worsened, with Saudi-led coalition airstrikes that killed the political leader of the Houthi rebel movement, Saleh al-Sammad, on April 19, and over 50 Houthi militants, including two senior commanders, on April 27. How Yemen’s Houthis respond to the attacks will determine the course of the war in the coming months. But any hopes for movement toward a political solution appear to be dashed, despite quiet efforts by Oman to bring the parties together, and public admonitions by U.S. officials to their Saudi counterparts to focus on bringing this tragic war to an [...]
