Middle East & North Africa Archive

Crises and upheaval in the Sahel and West Africa have altered the regional security terrain. Challenges that were once disparate and manageable are increasingly becoming intertwined and more pronounced. With the growing mobility of conflicts, the need for a more cooperative regional context has never been as pressing. Each country in the region has a stake in improving stability, and collectively they have the capacity to tackle the threats to peace and security—but first, they each must overcome a host of domestic obstacles. The influence of four countries in particular—Morocco, Algeria, Chad and Nigeria—is a central fact of geopolitics in […]

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump railed at the ineffectiveness of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, promising that if he was elected there would be dramatic change. Yet candidate Trump offered few details on precisely what he would do differently. This week his first foreign trip as president began in the Middle East. While there, Trump provided signs of exactly what he intends to do in the region. In terms of broad strategic objectives there is some continuity between the two presidential administrations. Like Obama, Trump seeks to preserve the Middle East’s regional order and help protect Israel and […]

When U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his speech on Islam to a gathering of Muslim and Arab leaders in Riyadh last weekend, one head of state was notably absent among the dozens of kings, sultans, emirs, presidents and prime ministers in the audience. Turkey, one of the Muslim world’s most powerful states, chose to send its minister of foreign affairs, a much lower-ranking official than the top-level representatives in the lavish hall. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had recently visited Saudi Arabia and had met with Trump in Washington only days earlier, with the two men declaring the meeting a […]

Oil markets are expecting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies to extend their supply quotas when they meet in Vienna on Thursday. The current production cuts have failed to drain bloated oil inventories due to a remarkable resurgence in U.S. shale production. Keeping production down will not be easy for the coalition of 24 oil producers, 11 of which are not in OPEC. Even if fully implemented, an extension of the deal will likely just prevent oil prices from falling, while giving more market share to U.S. shale. It seems that OPEC has lost the […]

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? John Kerry, at the time a decorated but unknown veteran of the Vietnam War testifying before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, famously posed this piercing question while calling for an end to the war in April 1971. The circumstances are vastly different, and my intention is not to draw a parallel between the war Kerry and so many other Americans opposed and the senseless violence we see in various parts of the world today. But I could not help think of Kerry’s question when […]

Has Donald Trump lost faith in realpolitik? On the campaign trail, the U.S. president promised to adopt a hard-nosed approach to promoting America’s interests. He ostentatiously spurned the stock talking points about his country’s values and global mission that most presidential candidates tend to trot out. Since taking office, Trump and his advisers have sometimes repeated the case for a cold-eyed approach to foreign affairs. The president told one interviewer that the U.S. is not morally superior to Russia. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned diplomats that an excessive emphasis on advancing American values “really creates obstacles to our […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, visited Africa for the first time as head of state on Friday, traveling to northern Mali, where France led an intervention to drive out Islamist extremists in 2013. Greeted by Mali’s president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in the northern city of Gao, where French troops are still stationed, Macron offered a vision largely in line with what he espoused during the campaign: tough talk on terrorism and an emphasis on the need for development so that […]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first overseas trip will begin in Saudi Arabia and Israel, two countries whose leaders have vocally welcomed Trump’s shift in approach to the region compared to his predecessor, Barack Obama. But the new president’s unpredictable nature means that neither country can take anything for granted during his visit. The White House has previewed the president’s trip, which will also take him to Italy for the G-7 Summit in Sicily and a meeting with the Pope, and Brussels for the NATO Summit. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, briefed the press Friday, outlining an ambitious […]

Echoing the symbolic spark of the 2011 uprising, a Tunisian vendor set himself on fire on Wednesday in the town of Tebourba outside Tunis, after police had instructed him to close his fruit stand. Riots ensued, and a crowd of young men clashed with police as the vendor was hospitalized for treatment. The incident took place at a tense moment in Tunisia’s stumbling democratic transition, which entered its seventh year in January. Protests over economic marginalization have multiplied across the south of the country, and on Tuesday, Chafik Sarsar, the head of the country’s electoral commission, resigned—refusing, he said, to […]

Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran are nothing new, but in recent days the level of acrimony has been increasing exponentially. Amid a shifting geopolitical landscape, the two countries have been sounding downright menacing toward one another, dispensing with the diplomatic practice of veiling their threats and creating new dangers in an already tumultuous region. Two questions arise: Why is the hostility worsening? And which of the two countries is growing stronger relative to the other? The latest round of public fulminations burst on the airwaves last week, when the powerful Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave a […]

While most of the Middle East is imploding from civil wars, terrorism, despotism and sectarianism, Iran will hold its 12th presidential election next week, on May 19. Despite the absence of palpable public enthusiasm, the election will have a profound impact on the fate of the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and seven global powers; on Iran’s relations with the United States; and on the ailing Iranian economy. Looming large on the horizon, too, is the sensitive issue of who could succeed the 78-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose health is rumored to be poor, since the president […]

As the Iraqi army comes closer to fully reconquering Mosul from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, questions are emerging about the future of relations between two of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Iran. Will the quest for influence in Iraq’s Sunni heartland lead to greater turbulence between Ankara and Tehran? Are they, as some warn, on an unavoidable collision course in Iraq? Turkey is worried that gains made by Iraq’s Shiite-majority government, which is friendly with Iran, only serve to expand Tehran’s influence over Sunni areas in northern Iraq. More worrying for Turkish President Recep Tayipp Erdogan is the potential for a […]

With the self-proclaimed Islamic State increasingly out of the headlines and on the back foot in Syria and Iraq, the damage wrought by the extremist group on cultural sites in both countries is no longer a consistent source of international outrage, like it was two years ago. Yet the destruction of heritage goes on. In January, for example, evidence emerged that Islamic State militants had wrecked more of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, demolishing the façade of the 2nd-century Roman theater, where the group had previously staged mass executions, and blowing up the Tetrapylon, whose monumental columns once anchored […]

On Barack Obama’s first day in office as U.S. president in 2009, he called Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank to discuss the war being waged at the time in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. The call came just two years after a devastating Palestinian civil war in which Hamas—the Islamist group that the United States, Israel and the European Union all designate as a terrorist organization—had expelled Abbas’ Fatah-led Palestinian Authority from Gaza. Back in 2009, in the midst of what the Israelis called Operation Cast Lead, Hamas was surging in popularity among Palestinians. For many in […]

Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, went on his first visit to the Gulf last month, spending six days in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. In an email interview, Aaron Jed Rabena, resident fellow at the Ateneo Teehankee Center for the Rule of Law and associate fellow at the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations, explains what was on the agenda, including protections for migrant workers and the conflict in the southern Mindanao region. WPR: How have ties been between the Philippines and the Gulf evolved in recent decades, and what have been past areas of cooperation? Aaron Jed Rabena: Traditionally, […]