In recent weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis have fired missiles and drones deep into Saudi Arabia, striking high-profile targets, including Riyadh’s airport and Aramco’s headquarters. The attacks follow a rapid Houthi offensive in September to seize key parts of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, which Saudi-backed government forces are now trying to roll back. Fatima Abo Alasrar, an affiliated scholar at MEI and non-resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, joins hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj to unpack the latest phase of the conflict. They discuss what the Houthis want, Riyadh’s calculus and search for allies, and how this campaign ties into Iran’s confrontation with the United States.
Geopolitical influence over trade increasingly rests on controlling the systems that make them work. The Middle East illustrates the stakes. US ports, cable corridors, cloud facilities, artificial intelligence (AI) investments, and maritime routes connect regional economies to global commerce while exposing them to external decisions and disruptions. For the United States, the challenge is to translate technological advantage into resilient networks rather than rely on centrality that can itself become a source of vulnerability and coercion.
Bonus Episode: Previewing Israel’s First Post-October 7 Election
Israel is preparing to hold what may be its most consequential election in decades. On October 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face his first electoral test since October 7, 2023. In this bonus episode of Middle East Focus, we present the audio from a recent MEI webinar, hosted in Israel on the eve of the vote. Senior Fellow Natan Sachs is joined by Dr. Shira Efron, Distinguished Chair for Israel Policy and senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, and Neri Zilber, veteran journalist and Financial Times correspondent. They explore what’s at stake in this historic election and how different outcomes could reshape Israel’s domestic politics and the wider region.
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.
MEI Senior Fellow Brian Katulis engages friends, colleagues, and policy experts in casual conversations on the most important happenings in the Middle East.
Turkey and Indonesia: Historical Roots, Contemporary Business Links
Though sympathy between Turkey and Indonesia has a long tradition, in part based on their shared experience of being Muslim-majority countries that successfully executed anti-imperialist struggles, for years this sympathy has failed to translate into a closer relationship. This is now changing. New economic linkages and the relative absence of thorny political issues are bringing them closer together. As President Abdullah Gül stated during a meeting in Jakarta in 2011, “A new era is beginning with Indonesia.” Economic agents such as businessmen and entrepreneurs are the pioneers of this era.
The latest round of peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) remains the Turkish government’s best bet not just to solve the country’s 29-year old “Kurdish problem” but also to feed its energy-hungry population and wean it off costly and politically risky Russian and Iranian energy imports.
Maliki in Washington: Arms Deals, Politics, and Proxy Wars
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in Washington this week for meetings with Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and President Barack Obama. We sat down with MEI’s Vice President for Policy and Research, Paul Salem, to discuss the topics on the table, what each side hopes to accomplish, and how the United States should approach Iraq.
Saudi Arabia & the Arab Gulf’s Disappointment with U.S. Policy
Whether Saudi Arabia takes a seat on the United Nations Security Council or not, the initial snub is aimed primarily at the United States. In particular, U.S.-Saudi relations are in for an exceptionally difficult period—perhaps a return to the policies of King Faisal bin Abdulaziz. It appears that Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf now share the view of Sir Charles Johnston, a British diplomat in the 1960s, who offered the following assessment of U.S.
An Alternative Partner to the West? Turkey’s Growing Relations with China
The relationship between Turkey and China has rarely been a point of focus for international observers in the early twenty-first century. However, the landscape has recently undergone a dramatic change, with increasing numbers of symposiums, forums, panels, articles, columns, think tanks, and researchers focusing on Sino-Turkish relations in China or in Turkey. The change is mostly due to the impressive rise of both Turkey and China as powers on the regional and global level, respectively. Today, Turkey is the sixteenth largest economy and China the second largest. At the same time, they are more ardently looking at and listening to each other.
The struggle for bodily integrity—a right broadly defined as the inviolability of the human body and the self-determination of humans over their bodies—has been at the center of revolutionary aspirations in Egypt. Sexual assaults, arbitrary arrests, and torture by security forces; corrupt and defunct state healthcare systems; the abuse of agricultural subsidies resulting in innutritious food products—all of these are realities that took a painful physical toll on Egyptians and helped drive them to demand an end to Mubarak’s regime.
Last month, when Secretary of State John Kerry sought to dispel the mounting skepticism of lawmakers over the advisability of launching punitive air strikes against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, he portrayed the rebel fighters in the Western and Gulf-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) as pluralistic and democratic, distinguishing them from jihadi groups and hard-line Islamists.[1]
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A New Alternative for Turkish Foreign Policy?
In June 2012, Turkey was accepted as a “dialogue partner” at the Beijing Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Although this decision did not completely satisfy the Turkish government, which apparently preferred the status of an observer, it still had a profound meaning, as Turkey is the first NATO member state to enjoy such a privileged institutional relationship with the SCO. This new relationship has become even more significant in light of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s declaration in a televised interview in January 2013 that membership in the SCO could become an alternative to Turkey’s stalled EU accession process. More recently, the brutal suppression of the Taksim Gezi Park demonstrations by Turkish security forces heightened concerns about the future of democracy in Turkey, giving rise to more frequent comparisons between the Turkish regime and the authoritarian political systems of the SCO member states.
Dr. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, once a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, former presidential candidate, and head of the Strong Egypt Party, spoke with Cornelis Hulsman, editor of Arab-West Report, in an interview for MEI regarding his break from the Brotherhood, Morsi’s ouster, and what he sees as necessary for Egypt’s future.
You were once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why did you leave the organization?
A Discussion with Ken Pollack, Author of Unthinkable
On Wednesday, October 16, 2013, the Middle East Institute hosted author and Brookings senior fellow Ken Pollack for a discussion of his book, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy(Simon & Schuster, 2013). In his latest work, Pollack explores the protracted tensions underlying the U.S.-Iranian relationship, how it evolved to its current status, and how the U.S. should best address Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The oldest peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East, MEI’s flagship journal covers politics, society, and culture in the region.
