Research & Commentary Results

Khaled Elgindy and Lara Friedman discuss the public launch of their congressional teach-in series, “Israel-Palestine: Where We Are, What Comes Next, and Why It Matters to Congress.” The series of webinars features an array of American, Palestinian, Israeli, and international experts on topics dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy.

At a press conference on Thursday, MK Mansour Abbas, head of the newly elected Islamist party in Israel, the United Arab List (Ra’am), made what many in the Israeli media dubbed a historic speech. In an effort to reach out to the Jewish Israeli public, he spoke in Hebrew and during the prime time on television often given to Israeli politicians. Speaking surrounded by the party’s green flags, the conservative Islamist quotedverses from the Quran calling for the creation of “an opportunity for a shared life, in the holy and blessed land for the followers of the three religions and both peoples” and told his Hebrew-speaking audience that “Now is the time for change.”

Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) is the U.S. military’s name for the international intervention to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq starting in 2014. While OIR has been a success, it has necessarily been imperfect. Throughout the campaign, cost-benefit calculations made by policymakers led to missed opportunities and possibly a longer conflict. These decisions will have lasting repercussions that could undermine the hard-won victory against ISIS, as well as the ability to partner in future interventions. In particular, the United States mishandled its partner relationships in the war to defeat ISIS. Political considerations apparently won out against supporting and sustaining the SDF, our military partner forces.

With virtually all of the vote in and results unlikely to change, it is clear: Not only will there be no kingmaker in Israel’s latest election, there will probably be no king.

While support for Israel across the political spectrum remains strong in Washington, the traditional bipartisan consensus in favor of unconditional support for Israel has begun to fray in recent years.

A solid defense needs a potent deterrent, which requires a credible offense.

As Syrians mark the 10-year anniversary of the 2011 uprising this week, it remains inescapably true that the country’s debilitating crisis is far from over. After a decade of conflict that was initiated and driven by an utterly ruthless regime and reinforced and diplomatically protected by its Russian and Iranian allies, Syria is broken.

It has been more than a month since the launch of military operations by Syrian regime forces and their allies, with air support from the Russian air force, in the Syrian Badia — the country’s expansive central desert region — in an attempt to eliminate ISIS cells deployed there. To date, however, these operations have not yielded any tangible results.

In a new policy briefing book, entitled The Biden Administration and the Middle East: Policy Recommendations for a Sustainable Way Forward, MEI scholars tackle a large number of country-specific and region-wide issue areas, laying out both the abiding U.S. interests and specific recommendations for Biden administration policies that can further U.S. interests amid a region in turmoil.

On Feb. 4, President Joe Biden announced the end of U.S. support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s offensive military operations in Yemen. This decision fuelled optimism about a U.S. return to negotiations over the JCPOA with Iran. Instead of engaging with the United States, Iran has supported the Houthi-orchestrated Marib offensive and stepped up its diplomatic efforts in Yemen.

The understandings reached between Washington and Jerusalem half a century ago establish the critical context for the Biden administration’s current effort to restore the JCPOA, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fiercely opposed during its adoption by the U.N. Security Council in July 2015 and which he still bitterly contests today.

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is pleased to make available to the public a keynote address by Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which kicked off the first MEI-CENTCOM Annual Conference. In the pivotal moment of a new U.S. administration, amid major changes in the region including the signing of the Abraham Accords and the incorporation of Israel into CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, Gen. McKenzie joined MEI Senior Vice President Amb. (ret.) Gerald Feierstein in conversation to address key issues and build on his June 2020 discussion with MEI President Paul Salem on CENTCOM’s approach to a changing Middle East.

The following article addresses the question of how the Middle East might develop in the coming decade. Long-term and detailed strategic predictions are a thankless task and are often doomed to failure. Therefore, this article refrains from attempts at prophecy but deals instead with “thinking about the future.” It opens with an analytical framework for scenario development, supplemented by “trends impact” and “horizon scanning.” The second section studies “the futures of the past,” in terms of what we might learn about the pitfalls of future projection and scenario-building from those outlining possible futures for 2020 from years past. Then, on the basis of the first two sections, four scenarios elaborate some distinctly different pathways that the Middle East might take to 2030. Finally, the article concludes with several key takeaways for Israeli decision makers.

Earlier in February, Iran’s minister of intelligence, Mahmoud Alavi, signaled that if the U.S. continues provoking the country, Tehran might lash out like a “cornered cat” and consider the nuclear option. Will Joe Biden’s late reentry into the JCPOA and the expected resulting increase in tensions influence Iran’s strategic logic on nuclear weapons? A look back at the history of Iran’s decision making on the issue suggests that shifts in military threat assessments are as important as technical developments when it comes to Tehran’s nuclear strategy.