Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
What happens when a petrostate loses its oil rents? While the oil market continues to go through boom-and-bust cycles, cases such as Iraq provide evidence of how the rapid loss of oil revenues—traumatic decarbonization—may affect the politics and stability of these petrostates. In Iraq, multiple shocks to oil revenues from 2014 through 2020 fundamentally altered the organization and concentration of political power in Iraq with destabilizing and democratic consequences.
Lebanon is on the verge of complete collapse, and if Washington is serious about preventing not just another failed state but a growing normalization of unchecked authoritarianism in the Middle East, it must stop outsourcing leadership on Lebanon to France.
Both historical and modern-day conflicts in the Middle East have all been centered around classical territorial considerations of the loss or recovery of land. Escaping that cycle required a shift away from one of the main root causes of conflict: geography. The current changes in the region, characterized by a significant drive toward de-escalation and a growing willingness to periodically part ways with traditional allies, may be telling symptoms of a profound tectonic shift toward “quantum politics.”
In recent years, Iraq has become one of the leading destinations for Chinese investments in the Middle East and a crucial link in Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. To capitalize on its geostrategic location and central position within the Chinese BRI, Iraq is seeking to develop a sprawling new 54-square-kilometer port project, known as al-Faw Grand Port, which will reduce the country’s reliance on Arab Gulf ports and overland transit from Iran and Turkey. The project also underscores Iraq’s growing economic rivalry with neighboring Iran, as both countries seek to carve out a similar niche in handling regional transit traffic.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Ukraine’s partners, led by the United States and spread over the globe, have increasingly responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of February 2022 with a dizzying array of financial, humanitarian, and military assistance. Unfortunately, the way in which the U.S. and Ukraine’s other partners have provided military assistance over the last year — that is, by delivering a wide range of equipment, ammunition, and training — significantly undermines the longer-term objective of developing a sustainable system via which Ukraine can generate combat power in the coming years to overcome Russian aggression.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
In January 2023, the United States began to reroute $72 million of assistance to Lebanon to support the salaries of Lebanese soldiers and police officers, most of whom could barely make ends meet due to the disastrous economic situation in the country. It took Washington more than two years to make that decision, partly because US laws regarding this type of aid were slightly unclear. But more importantly, the voices inside and outside the US government who argued against further support to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), let alone direct cash assistance, succeeded in delaying the process. This was yet another example of how, despite continued US commitment to the LAF through successive administrations, the US military assistance program remains vulnerable to US domestic politics.https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-lebanon-bu…
As Women’s History Month in the U.S. draws to a close, women in the armed forces of several Middle Eastern countries continue to achieve historic milestones, with many now serving as pilots, engineers, peacekeepers, and in special forces units. The role of women is steadily increasing as the result of new initiatives, policies, and gradually changing mindsets in the Middle East.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
In response to Lebanon’s seemingly imminent transition into a failed state, this article introduces a new framework to explain the country’s protracted crisis. In turn, we unpack what the past four years of international responses to Lebanon got wrong and make the case for a new assertive approach for Washington to take — one that empowers local stakeholders working to recapture the state and reform the country’s political economy.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
The painful reality is that Washington’s hastily cobbled together ethno-sectarian political system for post-2003 Iraq ended up doing the opposite of what it intended. The regional domino effect was also the opposite of what the U.S. had hoped for, as Iraq became a cautionary tale that regimes could use to undermine the democratic desires of their own populations.
As part of a continued collaboration with the Middle East Peace and Security Forum held in Iraqi Kurdistan at the American University of Kurdistan, the Middle East Institute and the Iraq Policy Group held a workshop on Nov.15, 2022 focusing on challenges of economic diversification, energy transition, and impacts on labor markets in Iraq and the Gulf region. This report provides the insights and analyses of a select group of participants from the workshop.