Column Archive

If a Western policymaker had sketched out a dream scenario for the Arab world in 2013, it would have looked something like this: In Egypt, President Mohammed Morsi would gradually mature into a semi-competent leader. In Syria, his counterpart Bashar al-Assad would fall quickly and the fragmented opposition would cobble together a half-decent government. Other countries in the region making the transition from dictatorship, such and Libya and Yemen, would make halting progress to lasting stability. Some Western officials had even greater ambitions. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has made restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process an early priority since […]

On Wednesday, Gen. Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s military chief of staff, announced that the country’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, had been removed from office. Egypt’s constitution will be suspended; Adly Mansour, the chief judge of the Constitutional Court, will temporarily assume the presidency and oversee a transitional government until new elections can be held at a date yet to be determined. The events of the “second Egyptian revolution” have effectively terminated the experiment as to whether the Muslim Brotherhood, having won parliamentary and presidential elections last year, would be able to construct a democratic regime. They now present the Obama administration […]

As the United States stumbles about in search of a coherent strategy in Syria, one idea that continues to resurface is the establishment of a no-fly zone. Its appeal is easy to understand. Facing a rebel advance in the summer of 2012, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military increasingly relied on airpower. As a result, civilian casualties escalated. With no response to the threat from the air, the rebel offensive faltered, and the Assad regime, which seemed on the verge of collapse, turned the tide. For the United States, a no-fly zone seems to provide a way to do something about […]

The recent announcement by the deputy commander of Russia’s Caspian fleet, Nikolai Yakubovsky, that Russia and Iran intend to hold a combined naval exercise in the Caspian Sea later this year should not have come as a surprise. Not only have the two sides engaged in such joint drills in previous years, but since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic have enjoyed a surprisingly harmonious relationship regarding regional security issues. The Iranian government has refused to intervene on behalf of the Muslim guerrillas fighting Moscow in Chechnya or in other parts of […]

Who cares about Darfur these days? The conflict in the western Sudanese region, which galvanized public opinion in the middle of the last decade, is now rarely in the headlines. This is not because the area is calm. Renewed violence has displaced 300,000 of its inhabitants this year alone. The United Nations and African Union still have 19,000 troops and police officers trying to keep the peace there. But fresher crises, such as those in Mali and Syria, have long replaced Darfur at the top of the international agenda. Yet policymakers grappling with these newer conflicts should keep Darfur in […]