The Other MoU: Launching a Europe-Gulf Resilience Initiative After the US-Iran Deal
The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the United States and Iran may have ended one of the most consequential Middle Eastern crises in decades, but it has not resolved the strategic problem it exposed. Whether the 60-day talks it set in motion will produce a final agreement remains far from certain.Yet the central lessons are already clear: Iran has preserved significant leverage, Washington has had to scale back its ambitions, and Europe and the Gulf face the prospect of protracted regional tension. Europe and the Gulf should therefore use the aftermath of the US-Iran deal to articulate their own “other MoU”: a Europe-Gulf Resilience initiative.
A Post-War Model for Verifying Iran’s Missile Arsenal
This study proposes a model for constraining and verifying Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal by employing a layered Strategic Verification Model with seven components: comprehensive baseline declarations; missile test and launch monitoring; intrusive inspections; quantitative and qualitative limits on missile capabilities; production controls, especially on solid-fuel manufacturing; a robust enforcement and compliance architecture; and regional confidence building measures.
Since June 2009, the Government of Iraq (GoI) has secured nearly a dozen major oil field technical service agreements with international oil companies (IOCs) after two highly publicized bidding rounds. The deals are seen as the cornerstone of Iraq’s economic development in the coming years. While future oil production has been rather optimistically projected as high as 12 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2020, significant obstacles to the development of the oil and gas industry remain.
The Status of Forces Agreement and Investing in Iraq: Risky Business?
In spite of ongoing security and political instability, Iraq remains one of the most fertile yet volatile regions in the world for emerging business opportunities, specifically in the petroleum industry. Since the completion of the widely successful “surge” and implementation of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), Iraq has experienced slow but steady improvements in security and economic opportunities in the petroleum sector. As a result, there has been an influx of international companies eager to engage Iraq’s ministries for access to these lucrative markets.
The Middle East Institute is proud to host Sean Foley, author of The Arab States: Beyond Oil and Islam (Lynne Rienner, 2010), for a discussion about the politics of the Gulf states and their role in the global economy. In the book, Foley presents a fresh picture of these states as cosmopolitan and tolerant societies that face many of the same socio-economic problems that other states do – including those that lack oil.
Transnational Networks and Local Challenges: Iraqis in Cairo
Originally posted March 2010
It is estimated that over four million Iraqi refugees have fled to neighboring countries in the region since the 2003 war began. While migration continued after the war, the peak of this influx was witnessed particularly in and after 2006 due to the acceleration of violence in central and southern Iraq. More particularly, the majority of these refugees fled due to direct threats to their lives and their immediate families.
Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and Taiwan’s Taipei 101 tower, the world’s two tallest skyscrapers, differ in height by a stunning 1,076 feet, are separated by nearly 4,000 miles of ocean, and are situated in countries and regions which, linguistically and culturally, have little in common ― except business.
This Commentary first appeared as an op-ed in the The National, March 14, 2010.
Iraq’s parliamentary elections have just concluded, but the major political battles are about to begin. At stake is what kind of country Iraq will become. Will Iraq’s progress toward greater stability continue? Will it look east towards Tehran for support and encouragement, or to the United States and its fellow Arabs? The stakes are high, and no one can afford to remain uninterested while Iraq continues its dramatic political evolution.
The Kurds of Iran: A Look at their Past, Present and Future
The Middle East Institute is proud to host Carol Prunhuber, Sharif Behruz and Idris Ahmedi and for a lecture about the political, social and human rights status of Iran's Kurds, one of the country's largest ethnic groups. Iran's Kurdish population has long pushed for autonomy, and in 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared a "holy war" against the Kurds in Iran seeking self-rule. Since then the relationship between Iran's Kurds and the Islamic Republic has been characterized by frequent military crackdowns.
Beyond Iraq’s National Elections: Planning a New Phase in American Policy
This Commentary is an adaptation of a longer piece published by the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William and Mary on February 25, 2010.
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.
