Research & Commentary Results

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.

Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen is a risky move motivated by various Saudi objectives in Yemen and in the region. The immediate objective is to save President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi from Ansar Allah’s advance on Aden and reinstall him as head of state by forcing Ansar Allah to make major political concessions. But the operation also marks the increasing willingness of the Saudis to use their own military rather than rely on the United States.

With its bold and public intervention in Yemen’s civil war, Saudi Arabia has cast off a half-century of caution and restraint in regional security affairs.

March 26, 2015 – Paul Salem discusses the new challenge the unfolding crisis in Yemen poses to the region, and how the Arab League and the United States are responding as the fight against ISIS continues.

 Ivan L. G. Pearson’s In the Name of Oil: Anglo-American Relations in the Middle East, 1950-1958 provides a comprehensive analysis of the extent to which British interests in the Middle East influenced or were furthered by the United States between 1950 and 1958.

Over the weekend, the Western and Arab media reported extensively on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks, given on the fourth anniversary of the Syrian revolution, that the United States must negotiate “in the end” with Bashar al-Assad. Are his remarks anything new, or do they represent a continuation of previous policy? MEI’s Robert Ford weighs in.

It has long been known that the Assad regime, facing a shortage of manpower in its regular army, has had to rely on irregular paramilitaries in its bid to reverse rebel advances. This became particularly apparent in 2013, when Hezbollah openly declared its participation in the capture of Qusayr, a town in Homs Province on the border with Lebanon.

A shorter version of this analysis was published in Foreign Policy.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy, or click here for an extended version of this analysis.

This article was first published on Foreign Affairs.

When the Houthis, a Shia rebel group in Yemen, forced the country’s pro-Western president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, to flee the capital this past January, many in the region concluded that another Arab state had fallen into Tehran’s lap—a result, as one prominent commentator put it, of Iran’s “offensive state, the likes of which we have not seen in modern history.”

In his recent National Interest blog post entitled “Assad Will Have to Stay for Awhile,” Paul Pillar advises the Obama administration to ignore regional calls to help bring down the Assad regime, for three reasons: the resilience of the regime; the need to avoid fighting it and ISIS simultaneously; and the need to preserve stability in Syria. Pillar’s three reasons are flawed.

Hind Kabawat is a senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and a senior research associate at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution (CRDC) at George Mason University. Since 2012, she has been conducting periodic conflict resolution and peace-building workshops for communities within Syria and for Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Turkey.

Observers can be excused for confusion over events in Yemen. In late January, Ansar Allah—the group often referred to as Houthis—kidnapped President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s chief of staff, sacked the presidential palace, and effectively placed the president and government ministers under house arrest. Ansar Allah’s demands, strangely, were that the president and government stay in power rather than leave.

Analysis of Syrian civil war dynamics tends to draw a sharp contrast between the southern front, referring to the southernmost provinces of Deraa, Quneitra, and Suwayda, and the north. Most observers point to the south, in contrast to the north, as lacking a significant Islamic State (ISIS) presence. How true does this general assessment hold? Are radical or extremist groups much less influential in the south?