Geopolitical influence over trade increasingly rests on controlling the systems that make them work. The Middle East illustrates the stakes. US ports, cable corridors, cloud facilities, artificial intelligence (AI) investments, and maritime routes connect regional economies to global commerce while exposing them to external decisions and disruptions. For the United States, the challenge is to translate technological advantage into resilient networks rather than rely on centrality that can itself become a source of vulnerability and coercion.
Bonus Episode: Previewing Israel’s First Post-October 7 Election
Israel is preparing to hold what may be its most consequential election in decades. On October 27, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face his first electoral test since October 7, 2023. In this bonus episode of Middle East Focus, we present the audio from a recent MEI webinar, hosted in Israel on the eve of the vote. Senior Fellow Natan Sachs is joined by Dr. Shira Efron, Distinguished Chair for Israel Policy and senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, and Neri Zilber, veteran journalist and Financial Times correspondent. They explore what’s at stake in this historic election and how different outcomes could reshape Israel’s domestic politics and the wider region.
Israel Was Built on Hope. This Election May Be Our Last Chance to Save It
Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva, means “the hope.” Israel is not just another country, but the culmination of a 2,000-year-old dream of national redemption. The rebirth of the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, just three years after the Holocaust, was a miraculous triumph of hope over all odds.
Today, that hope has been shattered and the elections on October 27 have become the most consequential in Israel’s history.
Since 1967, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been a contested feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ultimate disposition of the settlements and ongoing activity related to their growth have repeatedly defied agreement in negotiations over a resolution to the conflict.
The Houthis are a political-military faction and Zaydi religious movement founded in northwestern Yemen in the 1980s. A key member of Iran’s Axis of Resistance with links to other militant organizations in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, the group has continued to pose a threat to Western interests on a global scale.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a proposed multinational infrastructure initiative aimed at upgrading connectivity between the three regions through integrated trade, energy, and digital networks. Announced at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023, IMEC is envisioned partially as a counterweight to China’s international infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
After a decade of post-Arab Spring isolation, Turkey’s leaders have recognized that their ambition to position the country as an agenda-setter on the world stage requires active engagement in all directions. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of executive authority has centralized foreign policy decision-making and tied it to his domestic political priorities, transforming the country’s revisionist approach to one shaped primarily by personal and pragmatic interests.
MEI Senior Fellow Brian Katulis engages friends, colleagues, and policy experts in casual conversations on the most important happenings in the Middle East.
US-Iran escalation and its implications for the South Caucasus
Over the past several weeks geopolitical experts have been talking a lot about what the surprise U.S. drone attack on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC – Quds Force, on Jan. 3 means for the Middle East and relations between the major powers. What has received considerably less attention, however, is what Soleimani’s killing means for the South Caucasus, a region whose small size belies its strategic importance.
Precarious Workers and Neoliberal Narratives in Post-revolutionary Iran: Top-down Strategies and Bottom-up Responses
How did the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives over labor evolve since the 1979 revolution? What paved the way to neoliberal discourses, particularly since the 1990s? Which processes and legal measures made workers precarious? What role did workers play, and along which lines did they develop their trajectories of resistance? These questions are at the core of this article, which explores the above-mentioned issues from two different vantage points: a top-down approach, which looks at official narratives, as well as the legal strategies that contribute to the precarization of workers; and a bottom-up perspective, which seeks to understand workers’ practices of resistance and counter-hegemonic actions.
Sustainable development: An unavoidable path for Egypt’s future
Egypt has realized a significant number of changes in healthcare, education, and economic reform policy over the past decade. It is also increasingly looking toward policy for development that emphasizes cohesive problem solving, in line with its Vision 2030 strategy, which highlights the need for positive knock-on effects from investments in human development
The day after Soleimani: Israel contemplates “success leveraging”
Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was on Israel’s “most wanted” list for more than a decade. Israeli intelligence identified him as a looming threat early in his career, and with time he outperformed even the graver threat predictions, as he systematically built the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force into a formidable regional stealth operation. Soleimani was a highly sophisticated executioner of Iran’s long-term strategy, which can be described as an effort to build a “double crescent.”
As an Iraqi American who lived through the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 U.S.-led invasion to bring about regime change, I have witnessed firsthand how U.S. wars in the region can break out when Baghdad and Washington fail to understand each other’s intentions and motives.
Trump’s “peace plan” aims to bury the two-state solution
The notion that an American president, in consultation with two Israeli leaders, could decide on the future of Palestinians without any Palestinian involvement seems to epitomize Trump’s overall approach to the conflict.
Iraq: Sadr withdraws support for protests in a political power play
So far, disproportionate violence by security forces against the civilian protesters has led to the exact opposite of what they sought to achieve, causing protesters’ numbers to swell.
It’s shameful to use Palestinians as props in Israel’s election
The upcoming visit to the White House by Israel’s caretaker prime minister has nothing to do with the Middle East conflict and everything to do with giving yet another political favor to Benyamin Netanyahu. While the Jan. 28 visit may be all about the Israeli elections, it is shameful and dangerous for American officials to be giving time and space for discussions that affect the Palestinian people without their involvement.
Protests, not geopolitics, will shape the Middle East in the new decade
However unsurmountable geopolitical crises may seem today, it will be domestic protests that determine the social and economic landscape in the Middle East in the coming years.
The ties that bind: The South Caucasus and the Middle East
As neighboring regions, the South Caucasus and the Middle East are inextricably intertwined — so much so that the former is sometimes even considered part of the Greater Middle East. While geographical proximity is the strongest driver of interconnectivity between the two regions, geopolitics, business ties, and energy interests also link countries from the South Caucasus and the Middle East and form the basis for important bilateral and regional relationships.
Against the backdrop of a massive economic and financial crisis and a now three-month-old nationwide protest movement, Lebanon swore in a new government on Tuesday — a technocratic cabinet that is widely seen as a “shadow government” for Hezbollah and other entrenched political leaders. MEI’s Paul Salem, Randa Slim, and Bilal Saab join host Alistair Taylor to discuss what lies ahead.
Iran’s “harsh revenge”: Is blocking the Strait of Hormuz really a plausible option?
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force, on Jan. 3, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the U.S. of Iran’s “harsh revenge.” There has been much speculation around the timing, location, and the type (or form) of Iran’s promised revenge. Amin Mohseni-Cheraghlou takes a closer look at the impact of the widely discussed strategy of blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
On Jan. 5, shortly after Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in Iraq by an American drone strike, Tehran announced that it would no longer remain committed to the enrichment restrictions laid out under the 2015 nuclear deal. Even though European diplomats have rushed to assuage Iranian concerns about the possible resumption of international sanctions, Tehran perceives this as an extension of the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign and is very unlikely to back down or substantially change its defiant behavior — domestically promoted as a counterpolicy of “maximum resistance” — even if punitive UNSC resolutions against it are reinstated.
No amount of analytical nuance or ingenuity can challenge the conclusion that the newly formed government in Lebanon is Hezbollah’s creation. The only question left to answer is: why did Hezbollah do it?
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.
