The Obama Administration is scrambling to keep itself out of a difficult position between two of its most important Middle East allies, Turkey and Israel.
The two countries have seen their relations deteriorate for years now, highlighted by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s dressing down of Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World [...]
Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi have an article in the Cairo Review of Global Affairs on the Arab Spring as seen from what they consider to be the perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their analysis explores Iran’s regional ambitions and calculations during an IRI-perceived decline in the U.S.–Israeli–Saudi vertex. According to [...]
Reprinted with permission of Think Progress
Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty doesn’t want you to think he’s a neoconservative. But neoconservatives themselves — not exactly known for diverse views — roundly approved of his foreign policy speech this week. One line of Pawlenty’s talk dovetailed quite nicely with neoconservative platitudes about [...]
Victoria’s secret is that, like the previous interceptions like those of and the Karine A, its interception comes at a time when Israel is being urged to move forward in the peace process and doesn’t want to. But it is also radically reinterpreting international law, particularly the Laws of Armed Conflict and the Law of the Sea.
BBC poll data indicates that 25% percent of Egyptian respondents view Iran favorably, nearly the same number as view U.S. influence as positive (26%). Nearly equal numbers of Turkish respondents approve of the influence of the U.S. (35%) and Iran (36%). Half of those polled, in countries long regarded as the staunchest Middle East allies of both the U.S. and of Israel–50% in Egypt, 49% in Turkey– expressed negativity about U.S. influence, with only 32% of Egyptians and 45% of Turks worried about Iran.
Tony Karon has a nice analysis up at Abu Dhabi’s the National. Many pundits in the U.S. have delivered the verdict that Iran won in the Arab uprisings. But Karon spots a false choice, and once again Turkey is the critical example.
Viewed through the prism of a zero-sum conflict between a [...]
If you haven’t already, head over the website of the Nation and read every last word of Matt Duss’s report from Herzliya, the biggest annual Israeli security conference. The event is best known for being where Israeli rightists and U.S. neocons swoon over each other.
Just look at some of the Americans who took [...]
More than thirty years of enmity and deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Iran aren’t going to go away overnight — or over two meetings, maybe four, five, ten. It will take time.
So one thing to be heartened by is just the fact that Iran and the P5+1 countries, including the U.S., are sitting [...]
A WikiLeaks cable reported this week suggested that the main Iranian obstacle to striking a nuclear fuel swap deal with the West was not the deal itself (or the Western countries involved), but internal Iranian politics.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took heat from his right flank on the issue during a 2009 push for [...]
All four of the ambassadors who received recess appointments from President Obama were considered fully qualified by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who approved their nominations and sent them to the full Senate for confirmation. All have been kept from taking up their diplomatic posts on by unilateral actions on the part of one or two senators, who prevented their appointments from reaching the Senate floor for the votes that almost certainly would have confirmed them.
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