Gulf and Arabian Peninsula

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.

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.”

Read full article at Politico Magazine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come to the United States, spoken his piece and returned home to Israel to finish campaigning for the March 17 elections. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington was neither the triumph he expected nor the disaster forecast by opponents of the visit. Indeed, the visit shed no new light on the supposedly central issue of the day: the state of play in the Iran negotiations.

This article was first published by The National Interest.

The Middle East is experiencing unprecedented upheaval, and by all indications the region is likely to remain in turmoil for the foreseeable future. From Yemen to Bahrain to Syria and Lebanon, the sectarian agendas and geopolitical maneuverings of the two regional heavyweights – Iran and Saudi Arabia – will likely remain the key drivers fueling the regional fire.

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.

When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) overran Mosul last June, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the preeminent Shi‘i cleric in Iraq, called for voluntary jihad. The outlook for the central government was bleak. Reports from the battlefronts, as well as threatening statements by ISIS leaders, suggested that the capital Baghdad could also fall to ISIS. The group repeatedly massacred its captives and systematically destroyed important religious and cultural sites.

This article was first published by The National Interest.

The late January visit to Armenia by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif got little media attention, but it could have significant ramifications for geopolitics in Eurasia. Specifically, the trip could help Russia gain a trade outlet that softens the blow of Western sanctions.
 

Over the course of the past ten years, NATO[1] has consistently invited Saudi Arabia and Oman to join the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), which launched in 2004 as a cooperation framework between NATO and the GCC countries. So far, the ICI contains just four Gulf partners (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates), and neither Riyadh nor Muscat has accepted the invitation.

It appears that the senior princes who run Saudi Arabia don’t read Western news reports about their country or the numerous analyses of Saudi affairs put forth by American and European think tanks. If they did, they would have known that the death of King Abdullah was going to set off a “succession crisis” that would divide the ruling family and possibly destabilize the kingdom. They clearly did not get the memo.

I ran into some Anbaris in Washington this week. All of them have lost friends or relatives in the fight against Islamist extremism in one form or another. They had interesting things to say.

This article first appeared in The National Interest.

Thanks to the unending American-Russian standoff over Ukraine, there are voices in Tehran that seem to believe that the road to international rehabilitation goes through Moscow.

This article first appeared in The National Interest.

In Iraq, the Islamic State (ISIS) is no longer on the offensive. That is particularly true on the Kurdish front in the north where the ISIS onslaught is now contained.

The Iraqi Kurdish military, the Peshmerga, proved to have the capability to repel the extremist Sunni fighters from ISIS and to hang on to recaptured territory. They have done so largely without many resources or support from West.