As they sweep across northern Syria, the advancing rebels are posing fundamental questions not just for the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but for watching neighbours and Western leaders.
Last week, as I made my way to Beirut airport, I drove through bombed out streets in an empty city. The Lebanese national airline still bravely flew in and out, its planes weaving their way between Israeli airstrikes. I boarded my flight to attend a conference, hoping we would make it out safely. I left behind a population that had paid a very heavy price for 13 months of war between the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israel: thousands of dead and injured, thousands of homes and businesses destroyed, and over 1.2 million displaced.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
For decades, the MENA region’s pivotal role in the global economy has been rooted primarily in oil and gas exports. The region’s GDP grew from $1 trillion USD in 2000 to nearly $4.5 trillion in 2022, and more than 60% of that combined GDP is in its oil-exporting countries.
Across both the Biden and Trump administrations, the US has consistently viewed China as the primary global rival, particularly in the fast-evolving field of artificial intelligence. President Biden’s administration recently underscored this stance with the first-ever National Security Memorandum (NSM) on AI, which set a firm foundation for addressing the AI challenge posed by Beijing.
This article was first published in Policy Center for the New South. It was co-authored by Mohammed Soliman and Alberto Tagliapietra.
To abandon the Syria mission now would bring no meaningful benefit to the US, but it would swiftly and significantly empower America’s adversaries, like ISIS, Iran, Russia, and Assad’s regime.
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Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.
When news broke Friday night that Israel had launched its largest-ever military strike on Iran, a group of diplomats, administration officials, journalists and think tankers had just sat down for dinner at one of the best restaurants in Washington, hosted by a prominent ambassador.
Gunmen armed with explosives and assault rifles assailed the headquarters of Turkey’s state-run aerospace company near Ankara on October 23, in a terrorist attack claimed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK). The incident complicates President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s efforts to exploit the regional chaos that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel a year ago to advance his domestic and regional goals.
Last week, representatives from around 70 countries convened in Paris to pledge nearly $1 billion in aid for Lebanon. Moving forward, France and the US should work together to summon the political will needed to craft and implement a lasting political solution — one that can effectively safeguard against future wars between Israel and Lebanon.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Iran looms large as an important policy question in the Middle East these days. But it barely received mention on the campaign trail in the United States, where American voters are fixated on issues closer to home: the economy, abortion, immigration, and the health of America’s democratic system are all front and centre. This doesn’t mean that Iran is unimportant when it comes to US national security policy—it just these issues aren’t very likely to determine who will win the presidential race in November.
At last month’s Summit of the Future, the more than 190 UN member countries agreed to unprecedented new commitments on behalf of future generations, and they pledged to build a long-term future perspective into their mechanisms of governance, domestically and multilaterally. MEI’s Strategic Foresight Initiative program director Steven Kenney reflects on attending the summit and its outcomes.