اقرأ الأبحاث والتحليلات والتعليقات المتعمقة من زملاء وخبراء معهد الشرق الأوسط عن الشرق الأوسط.
In an August 9 interview with Axios, when asked about the endless swings of the Iran standoff, he shrugged it off as familiar territory. “It’ll work out in the end. It always does. It’s like a chess game.”
Behind the rhetoric sat a harder fact.
With sanctions repealed, Syrian policymakers must ensure that growing volumes of credit reach beyond the narrow political and commercial networks that have generally dominated Syrian finance. That will require a credit strategy aimed at sectors and regions historically excluded from formal finance. Syria’s specialized state banks offer an imperfect but ready-made mechanism to do so.
President Donald Trump’s disdain for strategy extends to process: mass National Security Council firings and reliance on a tiny circle of advisors have left the interagency policy process dormant amid the Iran war. The result is improvised, damaging moves like the Strait of Hormuz toll scheme. Reviving a professional, deliberative policy process is essential.
Since 1967, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been a contested feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ultimate disposition of the settlements and ongoing activity related to their growth have repeatedly defied agreement in negotiations over a resolution to the conflict.
The Houthis are a political-military faction and Zaydi religious movement founded in northwestern Yemen in the 1980s. A key member of Iran’s Axis of Resistance with links to other militant organizations in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, the group has continued to pose a threat to Western interests on a global scale.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a proposed multinational infrastructure initiative aimed at upgrading connectivity between the three regions through integrated trade, energy, and digital networks. Announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023, IMEC is envisioned partially as a counterweight to China’s international infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
After a decade of post-Arab Spring isolation, Turkey’s leaders have recognized that their ambition to position the country as an agenda-setter on the world stage requires active engagement in all directions. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of executive authority has centralized foreign policy decision-making and tied it to his domestic political priorities, transforming the country’s revisionist approach to one shaped primarily by personal and pragmatic interests.
البودكاست الأسبوعي الرائد لمعهد الشرق الأوسط حول السياسة الخارجية الأمريكية والقضايا السياسية والاجتماعية المعاصرة في الشرق الأوسط.
براين كاتوليس، زميل أول في معهد الشرق الأوسط كاتوليس يشارك الأصدقاء والزملاء وخبراء السياسة في محادثات غير رسمية حول أهم الأحداث في الشرق الأوسط.
زميل أول في معهد الشرق الأوسط غونول تول تستضيف كبار العلماء وقادة الفكر حول اتجاهات الديمقراطية العالمية وحالة النظام الدولي الليبرالي.
Ethiopia is Iran’s gateway to the Horn of Africa and the broader East Africa region. By helping Ethiopia in its ongoing conflict with the rebel Tigray Defense Forces, which represent the Tigray ethnic minority, Iran is preserving its so-called strategic depth in the region to bolster its influence.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin in the 1990s, military and economic relations between Iran and Russia have improved, as their tensions with the West have intensified. One aspect of the relationship that has received little attention is their growing economic and trade cooperation involving the production, export, and import of halal meat and other products since 2015.
After a grueling 20-year campaign, America concluded its war in Afghanistan where it started: with the Taliban in charge. But this isn’t your father’s Taliban. In recognition of their need for a firmer ideological base and their desire to establish a purely Islamic system, the Taliban rulers are gradually putting together the framework for their new ideological state. They are enacting three closely intertwined ideological initiatives in order to solidify their rule: fleshing out a state religious ideology, burnishing their “originalist” religious credentials, and channeling Afghan nationalism into religious nationalism. These ongoing efforts, which revolve around the Taliban’s Islamism, provide a preview of how the new rulers intend to interact with temporal political realities by provoking religious reform in order to rule Afghanistan.
What these attacks and many others in the region have in common is Iran’s irrefutable involvement. They may have different local contexts and their perpetrators, all loyal to Iran, may have different motivations, but every single one of those attacks was possible only because Iran provided either the weapons or the know-how to assemble and use them.
Turkey, like all other countries, is facing the harsh reality of climate change. Last year, it experienced one of the hottest summers on record. Blistering heat waves led to widespread wildfires in the country’s southwest, affecting five times more land than normal during the summer. Though Turkey usually has large water surpluses, some areas experienced shortages due to extreme drought. Others suffered heavy flooding, leaving scores dead.
On Dec. 23, Jordanian Minister of Industry, Trade, and Supply Yousef Shamali and Russia’s Ambassador to Jordan Gleb Desyatnikov attended a ceremony to finalize a bilateral cooperation agreement on science, culture, and education. This agreement highlights Jordan’s delicate foreign policy balancing act. The government, led by King Abdullah II, will continue to work with a diverse group of countries, even those with tense relations with the West, to bolster its security and economic opportunities. Mitigating security threats and increasing business opportunities is key to political stability and the continuation of the king’s rule amid Jordan’s persistent socio-economic problems. However, the king will need to be careful not to undermine his closest allies by working with their adversaries.
On Jan. 6, 2022, a U.S. district court judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) brought by the family of Ari Fuld, a dual U.S.-Israel citizen murdered in 2018 by a Palestinian teenager outside of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. The ruling demonstrates the strictly political nature of the lawsuit, whereby powerful interests with deep pockets use litigation and lobbying to target the PA’s finances, including foreign aid, in order to hasten its collapse, as well as the limits of this type of “lawfare” against the PA.
Will Raisi succeed where previous Iranian regimes have failed?
اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.
Intense fighting between the SDF and ISIS continued for the fifth day in Syria’s northeastern city of al-Hasakeh on Monday, following ISIS’s biggest attack in Syria and Iraq in three years. In the evening of Jan. 20, as many as 200 ISIS militants, many wearing suicide belts, launched a coordinated multi-axis assault on al-Sina Prison, shortly after detonating two car bombs parked along the exterior walls of its northern wing. In the chaos that ensued, SDF vehicles were seized and used to break through secure walls, clearing the way for hundreds of ISIS detainees to escape.
As Russia amasses more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, the Kremlin is holding the country at gunpoint while imposing outrageous demands on the West. NATO has never attacked Russia, while Moscow has waged wars against Georgia and Ukraine and still occupies their lands and militarizes the Black Sea.
On Jan. 13, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed alarm that millions of Afghans are on the “verge of death” thanks to a lethal brew of “freezing temperatures and frozen assets.” This was no idle warning. Notwithstanding the decline in fighting following the Taliban’s victory in August 2021, Afghanistan’s economy is in a deepening spiral of impoverishment and destitution.
Going into 2022, many of the main issues that dominated the EU’s relations with the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the ongoing talks in Vienna to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, as well as the uncontrolled influx of migrants from the region and Turkey’s long-stalled membership bid, remain on the agenda. Is the new year likely to see a resolution of any of these issues or any other significant changes in relations between the EU and the countries of the region?
Three days have passed since the Houthi attack on the UAE, yet there’s still a lot we don’t know about what really happened. Here’s what we do know: The Houthis officially stated that they were the ones who struck Abu Dhabi, and unlike in September 2019 when they made the same claim, this time they might not be lying. Yet this is not enough to help us answer what in my opinion is the ultimate question: to what extent were the Iranians involved in this attack?
يوم 17 يناير/كانون الثاني، نفذ الحوثيون هجومًا آخر استهدف منشأة نفطية إماراتية في أبوظبي، ما أدى إلى مقتل ثلاثة وافدين، وإلحاق أضرار بالبنية التحتية. ظاهريًا، يبدو أنهم يذكَّرون الإماراتيين بمدى ضعفهم وإمكانية الإضرار بهم إذا استمرت الهجمات ضد مصالح الحوثيين في اليمن. وبحسب ما ورد، كانت وسائل الهجوم عبارة عن طائرات مسيرة، وهي أداة بسيطة غير متماثلة متاحة للكثيرين واستخدمها الحوثيون على نطاق واسع في جميع أنحاء المنطقة. لسوء الحظ فإن القصة هنا قد أصبحت مألوفة للغاية وتتطلب استجابة متسقة الآن. ففي نهاية المطاف، من المرجح أن يتم نسخ وتكرار ما أصبح روتينيًا في الخليج في مواقع أخرى.
تُعد المجلة الرئيسية لمعهد الشرق الأوسط أقدم مطبوعة محكّمة مكرّسة لدراسة الشرق الأوسط الحديث، وتغطي المجلة الرئيسية في المعهد السياسة والمجتمع والثقافة في المنطقة.