While Arab and Israeli peace negotiators expend their energy trying not to bolt from their seats in exasperation, business men and women on both sides of the divide think they may just have found a way to peace that will prove faster, more entertaining, and definitely more profitable. Driven more by a quest for profits than by ideology, Arab and Israeli entrepreneurs are quietly working together on a variety of ventures. Small-scale partnerships between Israelis and Palestinians and between other Arabs and Jews have happened for years. Larger, higher-profile deals are now becoming more common. In recent months, an iconic [...]
Hats off to Hampton for live-blogging the CNAS Iran panel yesterday. Given how much trouble I have transcribing a sentence or two from a recording that I can go back and replay, I’m impressed. As for the panel itself, Dennis Ross makes a bunch of points that I’ve been underlining for a while, namely the dangers of regional proliferation that a nuclear Iran poses, and the fact that deterrence is an entirely unsatisfactory outcome to this impasse. I also really liked his formula of “weak carrots and weak sticks” to sum up our policy to date. For me, the strong [...]
I’m attempting to live-blog the Iran panel at the Center for a New American Security’s “Pivot Point” conference in Washington. We’ll see how this goes . . . Panelists are Nicholas Burns, James Miller, Dennis Ross, Suzanne Maloney, James Dobbins. Ambassador Burns sets the theme of the discussion: Should the next president continue the current U.S. policy of sanctions to try to persuade Iran to abandon its program, and of conditioning talks on that goal, or should he drop many of the preconditions for diplomacy, as a new CNAS report suggests? Miller begins to Summarize the CNAS report. Other panelists [...]
