The following article was published in the April 2015 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
April 23, 2015 – Marvin Weinbaum, director of the Center for Pakistan Studies at The Middle East Institute, explains Pakistan’s decision not to provide military aid for Saudi Arabia’s operation in Yemen, and how Prime Minister Sharif is working to repair relations with Riyadh.
Read the full article on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
An intense public debate is unfolding in Iran over the details of the ongoing nuclear negotiations. For a country that has been largely deprived of informed, open and critical discussions on the merits of this costly program, this is highly unusual. Even more striking, it is the hard-liners who are spearheading this dialogue in the run-up to the June 30 deadline for the final agreement.
Read the full article on CNN.
Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have always been thorny, but rarely has the state of affairs been as venomous as it is today.
Tehran and Riyadh each point to the other as the main reason for much of the turmoil in the Middle East. In its most recent incarnation, the Iranian-Saudi conflict by proxy has reached Yemen in a spiral that both sides portray as climatic.
Read the full article on Foreign Policy.
For the majority of Arabs, Syria symbolizes all that is wrong with Iranian influence in the Middle East. Since 2011, Tehran and its regional proxies have poured men, money, and weapons into Syria to prevent President Bashar al-Assad’s military defeat. In June 2013, Hezbollah’s intervention in the western city of Qusayr single-handedly turned the tide of the war in Assad’s favor.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, reiterating Turkey’s support for a diplomatic solution over the use of force regarding Iran’s nuclear program, welcomed the interim deal between Tehran and the world powers. Turkey’s slowing economy may be among the first to reap economic benefits from the deal, and Ankara’s longtime quest to become an energy hub could finally be realized. Yet the deal could also pose a challenge to Ankara’s Iraq and Syria policies and its recent rapprochement with the Saudis.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2013 proclamation of the Silk Road Economic Belt (“One Belt, One Road”) and Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives provided an overarching framework for understanding China’s strategic priorities over the coming decade. The land-based and sea-based Silk Roads will link Asia and Europe via the Middle East and Central Asia through a series of transcontinental railroads, pipelines, ports, airports, and other infrastructure projects.
Al-Hashd al-Sha‘bi—also known as the Popular Mobilization Units, the Shi‘i militias, or simply “the Hashd”—has joined Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish peshmerga to spearhead Iraq’s ongoing offensive against ISIS. The coordinated assault has scored significant successes in various parts of Diyala, Babil, and Salah al-Din, including the recapture of Tikrit. With this string of recent triumphs, the Hashd has provided a potent rallying point for a reinvigorated sense of Iraqi nationalism, albeit one with distinctly Shi‘i overtones.
Read the full article on LobeLog.
In the past four decades, the greatest achievements of American diplomacy were probably the Camp David Accords and the Dayton Agreement. Camp David led to the end of the perpetual state of war between Israel and Egypt. Dayton ended the carnage of the war in the Balkans.
Robert Baer’s See No Evil presents a firsthand account of the life of a CIA case officer in the war on terror. From recruiting agents in the volatile Bekaa Valley in Lebanon to wiretapping Abu Nidal students in France, Baer provides a fascinating description of his CIA service.
Read full article at The National Interest.
Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, was on his way back to Tehran from Lausanne as accolades began to pile up. At the airport, he received a rapturous reception, as if the Team Melli, Iran’s national soccer team, had beat Germany.
As the United States and other world powers pursued nuclear negotiations with Iran over the past 18 months, the Middle East descended into one of the worst periods of chaos and proxy conflict in its modern history, with Iran engaged aggressively in many of the region’s hotspots. Most leaders in the region fear that a nuclear deal with Iran will abet its aggressive interventionism and lead to further geopolitical and sectarian confrontation. But could the agreement—if it is completed—also create conditions for rebuilding stability?
March 24, 2015: Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at The Middle East Institute, discusses the mood in Tehran as the deadline for negotiations approaches, the state of U.S.-Iranian relations, and what reaching a deal could mean to that relationship and the Arab world, in a brief interview.
This article was first published on Al-Monitor.
President Hassan Rouhani’s recent trip to Turkmenistan cannot be dismissed as a one-off. Since coming to office in August 2013, the Rouhani administration has prioritized relations with the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union. Given the potential for economic ties and trade, Tehran’s aspirations are fully understandable.
This article was first published on CNN.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the Congress this week was as eagerly anticipated in Tehran as it was in Washington.
The Iranian reaction to the speech has been a combination of indignation and indifference.