Ever since the U.S. government announced in March 2004 plans to build “the largest embassy ever run by any country,” I have been on the case, poking fun at its over-wrought size (21 acres), excessive expense (US$750 million), and gargantuan personnel Read More »

If Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were the naïfs who foisted the United Nations on the world, George H. W. Bush was responsible for its revival as a political force. Read More »

Remember the name Kastelorizo; you heard it here first. It is the far-flung, easternmost island of Greece, 80 miles from Rhodes, 170 miles west of Cyprus, but just 1 mile off the coast of Turkey. Read More »

Terrified of the secular/modern/liberal demonstrators who made their presence known in Tahrir Square, as well as of the soccer hooligans, Mohamed Tantawi and Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have forged a mutually beneficial relationship Read More »

It’s not every day that someone like the U.S. secretary of defense forecasts an ally’s move but this just happened when Leon Panetta said that he believes, in the paraphrase of a Washington Post reporter, that “there is a strong likelihood that Read More »

Given the many excellent organizations dealing with Middle Eastern and Islamic issues, what niches does the Middle East Forum’s fill? We provide strategic counsel, as opposed to advocacy or apologetics. Read More »

My disagreements with the Bush policies parallel those of Rudy Giuliani. His new Foreign Affairs article, “Toward a Realistic Peace,” breaks dramatically with current policies on a number of issues, and especially vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict: Read More »

What does the Syrian government want in Lebanon? Some highly-placed observers in the American government are sanguine about its ambitions there. Read More »

In the initial years after political independence, Arab opinion leaders shied away from public criticism of their governments, fearing that anyone unsympathetic would seize upon their words and use them to discredit Arabic-speaking peoples. Read More »

Muslim-majority countries may be the main source of terrorism, but the leaders of these states generally take a harder line against their Islamists in opposition than do their Western counterparts. Read More »

The scourge of the twentieth century was overly-powerful governments; could the looming problem of this century be too-weak governments? The political scientist R. J. Read More »

When Egypt’s Lower House convened on Jan. 23, Islamists held 360 out of its 498 seats, or 72 percent. This astounding figure, however, reflects less the country’s public opinion than it does a ploy by the ruling military leadership to remain in power. Read More »

That’s the thesis implicit to David Goldman’s analysis at “Recall notice for the Turkish model.” After dubbing the Turkish economy a bubble that “is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency,” he makes this observation about the Read More »

Egypt Independent reports on vandalizing, looting, and fighting at the nuclear power plant being built at El-Dabaa, a town in the desert to the west of Alexandria. Read More »

I raised the issue of Turkey’s continued membership in NATO in April 2009 at “Does Turkey Still Belong in NATO?”; here I will collect others who agree that the issue at least needs to be raised. Read More »

Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Read More »

It’s not every day that the leader of a brand-new country makes his maiden foreign voyage to Jerusalem, capital of the most besieged country in the world, but Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, accompanied by his foreign and defense ministers, did Read More »

It is a matter of record that Israel is the subject of far more political and media scrutiny than its Arab neighbors. Read More »

Founded in 1798 by the scientists accompanying Napoleon on his invasion of Egypt and author of the monumental 20-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809-28), L’Institut d’ Égypte was burned down on Dec. Read More »

Military relations have been at the core of the Ankara-Jerusalem entente. These took off in February 1996 when the two sides signed a military training agreement that had Israeli air force jets flying over Anatolia, makaing the Turks the first Read More »