Research & Commentary Results

It is a near truism that U.S. relations with Pakistan have been historically unstable, waxing and waning, climbing to heights of interdependence and sinking to mutual recrimination. Yet this is presently a period unmarked by either high promise or driven by crisis. Rather than a reason, however, for leaving the relationship untouched and unexamined, this can be a time of unusual opportunity to create a more deliberative approach to thinking about the bilateral relationship and for shaping fresh initiatives.

The scale of Turkey’s intervention will have shaken Moscow and the losses incurred by pro-regime forces are serious and will further strain a Syrian Army that was already overstretched.

Moscow’s restraint suggests that President Putin will accept a Turkish slap to his credibility as an ally to the Syrian government.

A surge of cases could strike the region’s most vulnerable populations, notably the nearly 12 million refugees and internally displaced persons.

Turkey is running out of options in Idlib Province and in Syria. Aggressively taking on a task that is beyond its capabilities, the government in Ankara now is faced with doubling down on a high-risk gamble, hoping someone, somewhere will believe its bluff, or saving Turkey and the area from worse destruction. There are two things the U.S could do, working together with the EU, NATO, and the UN.

The past decade and a half have been a real whirlwind for Hezbollah, but the group seems to have weathered all of these storms, at least for now. However, it’s one thing for Hezbollah to survive and another altogether for it to thrive. In a special roundtable report from MEI, renowned Hezbollah analysts offer their perspectives on a series of key questions about the major upcoming challenges facing the group. This report includes contributions from Bilal Y. Saab, Nicholas Blanford, Nizar Hamzeh, Matthew Levitt, Magnus Ranstorp, Bruce Riedel, Randa Slim, and Michael Young.

The latest economic crisis in Syria is hitting the population hard. Syrians have been beset by currency depreciation, soaring prices for basic goods, and energy shortages that have left people to freeze in the harsh winter, leading to growing and increasingly vocal discontent.

The death of at least 33 Turkish soldiers and wounding of 60 more in Syria’s Idlib on Thursday night was a game-changing development. The crisis there and its effects represent an existential threat to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and for now, it appears likely that Turkey will remain alone in dealing with the crisis. That presents us with two possible scenarios, both bleak. If the world wants to avoid a true nightmare from becoming reality, it needs to wake up and get engaged.

U.S. Middle East policy tends to elicit the most heated debates in Washington. But if there’s one issue on which there’s near unanimous consensus it is that the region is in desperate need of a new security architecture that ideally would generate stability but more realistically reduce tensions and the risk of hostilities and escalation. Even regional antagonists agree that the time to form such an architecture is now.

This paper looks at the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS), and the Irregular Warfare Annex (IWA) to that guiding document, with recommendations on how to better implement the strategy. It also analyzes the current Russian way of conducting irregular warfare by reviewing their actions in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.

On Feb. 9, 2020, after five years of involvement in Yemen’s civil war as part of the Saudi-led coalition, the UAE’s leadership celebrated the completion of its phased military withdrawal from the country in a ceremony at Zayed Military City. Although the UAE’s withdrawal has provided an exit strategy from the stalemate in Yemen, it neither suspends Abu Dhabi’s role in the coalition nor curtails Emirati influence on the ground.

Now that all of the implementation deadlines have come and gone, where do things stand with the Riyadh Agreement, signed in late 2019 by Yemen’s Hadi government and the Southern Transitional Council?

Never has the international community looked more impotent, or worse indifferent, to what is the greatest humanitarian crisis in modern history.

Nearly a million civilians, 81 percent of them women and children, have been displaced from their homes in 90 days in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, amid a brutal military campaign by Syria’s Assad regime, Russia and Iran-backed militias.

There has been a largely overlooked yet significant trend in entrepreneurship in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country. Much of this has been concentrated in the country’s two main economic centers, Cairo and Alexandria, but there are also signs of a broader and more inclusive trend. Despite this boom, few start-ups seem to have left much of a mark beyond the early development stages. A lack of access to finance has long been recognized as a key obstacle, yet the approaches taken by the government and international development lenders have proven largely ineffective. If this, along with other obstacles, can be addressed, the country’s nascent start-up scene could become a catalyst for economic development.