Research & Commentary Results

In this week’s Monday Briefing, MEI experts Gonul Tol, Robert S. Ford, Charles Lister, and Paul Salem provide analysis on recent events including Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to Washington, the reshuffling of Iraq’s cabinet, King Salman’s forthcoming visit to Egypt, and the latest attempts by Jabhat al-Nusra over the weekend to disrupt the Syrian political process.

In this week’s Monday Briefing, MEI experts Charles Lister, Paul Salem, and Daniel Serwer provide analysis on recent events including the capture of Palmyra by Syrian government forces, preparations for the campaign to retake Mosul, the risk of further terrorist attacks in Europe like last week’s in Brussels. Allen Keiswetter also responds to recent comments by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia.

This article was originally published on NPR.

The Islamic State has been steadily losing territory in its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq, where a U.S. bombing campaign and a host of rival forces chip away at its holdings.

This article is the result of a recent visit by the authors to Baghdad where they met with government leaders, security officials, political party representatives from the various communities, and leaders of ten Iraqi think tanks. A version of this article appeared in the March 10 issue of the Arabic Al-Hayat newspaper.

Despite deep internal divisions, a massive security threat from ISIS, and a fiscal collapse due to low oil prices, the Iraqi government is struggling to move the country forward and deserves urgent support from international and regional players.

For the first time in almost half a century, the United States has acknowledged that it is “out of ideas” about how to address Israel’s occupation and fulfill a declared American interest in establishing a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

This piece was first published on RealClearWorld.

Amb. Robert Ford delivered the following prepared remarks at a hearing of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on January 12, 2016. Click here to watch C-SPAN’s coverage of the hearing.

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee,

It is an honor to be on this distinguished panel.  Thank you for inviting me.

Read the full article at Brookings. Amb. Daniel Kurtzer is a member of MEI’s International Advisory Council.

This paper is part of a MEI scholar series titled “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”

Abstract

This article was first published in Foreign Affairs.

This paper is part of a MEI scholar series titled “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”

This article was first published in The Hoover Institution’s The Caravan.

Daesh or ISIS does not represent an existential threat to any state except Syria and Iraq.  It occupies and controls ungoverned space in the region between Iraq and Syria and in parts of northern Africa; and its self-proclaimed Caliphate has benefited from the seizure of some income producing assets in these areas.  Daesh depends on the dynamism of success and expansion, both of which have been in short supply of late.

Read the full article on Al Jazeera America.

The White House recently acknowledged that it was out of ideas on how to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, raising — for the first time — the prospect that Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank is permanent.