What comes after Iraq? If President George W. Bush’s current troop “surge fails to produce an outcome that can be called “victory, what lessons will the United States draw for its future foreign policy? Will it turn inward, as it did after its defeat in Vietnam three decades ago? Will it turn from promoting democracy …

In an interview published last fall, King Abdullah II of Jordan warned against the eruption of civil war in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. Indeed, civil war remains a threat in three out of the five Arab countries in the eastern Mediterranean. Political developments in these countries during the past few months have demonstrated the fragility …

The Mubarak regime in Egypt is staging a major crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s main Islamist opposition movement and largest opposition group. About 300 Brotherhood members have been detained over the last three months under accusations of money laundering and terrorism, in addition to the usual charge of belonging to a banned organization. …

I began my career as a Foreign Service officer in Indonesia. There, journalists, diplomats and aid workers emphasized that local government was “incompetent, inefficient and corrupt. I heard the same when working in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. My colleagues often seemed contemptuous of the nations where they served. They overlooked the cultures’ virtues and …

Zbigniew Brzezinski has written a new book that might be a foreign-policy manifesto for Barack Obama. Its message is that America can recover from what Brzezinski calls the “catastrophic mistakes of the Bush administration, but only if the next president makes a clean break from those policies and aligns the country with a world in …

An era of increased democratization and political accountability is sweeping across the African continent. With deteriorating economic conditions, growing external support from the Diaspora and international pressure from Western governments and donors for political reform, Zimbabweans are following suit in finally heeding the call for democratic change in their beleaguered country. There are unprecedented signs …

CAIRO: As I stood in line at a checkpoint on the Israeli-Jordanian border decked out with a passport full of Syrian stamps, a book on Al Qaeda’s networks in Africa, and a camera full of pictures of Hezbollah supporters occupying downtown Beirut, I realized that crossing over as a Middle Eastern journalist could be a …

CAIRO: Part of modern medicine’s success is built on new drugs, in which pharmaceutical companies invest billions of dollars on research. The companies can recover their expenses thanks to patents, which give them a temporary monopoly and thus allow them to charge prices well above the cost of producing the drugs. We cannot expect innovation …

The idea of a separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinians, including a “separation fence, was first broached during the premiership of Yitzhak Rabin and again under Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, but remained dormant. Increased suicide bombings during Ariel Sharon’s tenure generated public and political pressure to build a fence that would …

It is not a coincidence that serious political talks are taking place simultaneously these days between top Lebanese political foes, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United States and each of Syria and Iran, Israelis and Palestinians, the Europeans and Syria, and, directly or indirectly, Israel and Saudi Arabia. For the past three years, since the …

For a US representative to actually sit at the same table with the Iranian and Syrian delegates during the regional conference held in Bagdad on March 10, is in itself, an important development. The next such meeting, scheduled for early April at the foreign ministerial level, offers the Bush administration a tremendous opportunity to go …

European leaders need to get serious about Europe’s cocaine problem. The “white lady is seducing a steadily growing number of Europeans, and remaining in a state of denial will only worsen the consequences. Cocaine used to be America’s problem, to the point that the United States started a major campaign against sellers and consumers of …

With the language of multiple and inter-related crises dominating descriptions of the Middle East, it is easy to believe that the Arab state is fragmenting into fiefdoms, sectarian strife and trans-nationally inspired chaos. Yet of the 22 member states of the Arab League, only three – Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon – show signs of current …

How far away are the Gulf states from engaging in a nuclear race in the Middle East? This is a legitimate question given the decision in December 2006 by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to establish a nuclear research program. Up to that point, the GCC states had never seriously considered the use of …

As the European Union prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome later this month, the EU is widely perceived to be on its knees. European integration is felt to have somehow met its Waterloo in 2005, when referendums in France and the Netherlands unexpectedly torpedoed the draft EU constitution. Media stories …

An Israeli-Palestinian discussion of the broad territorial, security and legal outlines of a Palestinian state is a good idea that has resurfaced for all the wrong reasons. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the current advocates of this approach of reversing the order of the Quartet’s “road map, did …

In the month since the agreement reached in Mecca between Fatah and Hamas, the implications for Palestine and the region have become increasingly apparent. The “Mecca agreement may have registered in the international media mainly for its role in the formation of a Palestinian national-unity government after many torments and trials; but the significance of …

The Media Line Ltd. They regard Bashar Al-Asad as their leader; they hang Syrian flags in their homes; their mother tongue is Arabic, and they see Israel as an occupying nation. They are the Druze community, and they live in the Israeli-held Golan Heights. For the past 25 years the Druze community in the Golan …

When people think about American power in the world, they usually list the country’s forbidding arsenal of bombers, aircraft carriers and troops. Yet America’s greatest strategic asset these days might not be its guns, but its universities. Higher education is arguably the last area in which the United States dominates the world. We’re discovering the …

As the ink continued to dry on the aid-for-nuclear freeze deal with North Korea, the Bush administration made an important announcement regarding another member of the “axis of evil. It had decided to talk to Iran as part of a regional conference to discuss the future of Iraq. The parties will be sitting together today …

West Sussex, England: American foreign policy sins are numerous and some are even unforgivable, like the invasion of Iraq – based on false accusations – which has resulted in much death and destruction. But to judge America by its neo-conservative foreign policy would be like judging Islam by what some radical, violence-prone Muslims have done …

West Asia exercises much power over the world. The region obsesses policymakers, it drives industries such as arms and energy, and it feeds the ideologies and counter-ideologies of global conflict. Yet, what sets West Asia apart from other regions is its inability and unwillingness to speak for its own people. West Asia is a concept …

Three years ago this month, international terrorism struck Europe. In simultaneous bomb attacks against trains in Madrid, Islamist terrorists killed 191 people and wounded over 2,000. Last month the suspects went on trial in a Spanish court. Violent extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam have hit many countries around the world, before …

Two Tuesdays ago, Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt spent 35 minutes with the president of the United States. In many ways, the meeting was unusual. First, protocol dictates that President George W. Bush meet with his counterparts; he does not typically meet with foreign parliamentarians. Moreover, between 2003 and 2005 Jumblatt lost his visa …

The plight of victims of sexual attacks during conflict has come to the fore once again when last week, the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor requested summons for two Sudanese connected with atrocities in Darfur. According to the Prosecutor, there is strong evidence pointing to the suspects’ responsibility for mass rape and other war crimes. Previously, …

A caustic former US ambassador named Chas Freeman compiled a volume he called “The Diplomat’s Dictionary. It included several memorable definitions, including “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ till you can find a rock, and “Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way. The Bush administration, which has generally favored the “find a …

Annie’s life was good – she had studied agriculture at a university and her husband was a gold and diamond trader. Together, they lived with their children in a four-bedroom house in Bukavu, which lies on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Yes, they had lived well. That is, until her …

With Turkey having entered election year, it is only a matter of time before speculation turns to the likely consequences for foreign policy of the possible outcomes. With the political environment in Turkey capable of sudden change, the febrile atmospherics – featuring a surge in nationalism and heightened European Union skepticism – are not necessarily …

Beirut has been my home for ten breathtaking if at times terrifying years. Lebanon has been my story for even longer than that – twenty five years in all. It is where I first saw a dead body, that of an unknown man who had been shot during the Civil War in the early 1980s. …

In recent weeks, Italy’s government fell after losing a parliamentary vote on the country’s troop deployment in Afghanistan, while the United Kingdom and Denmark announced that they were to begin withdrawing their troops from Iraq. Whereas the Bush administration is deploying an additional 21,000 American soldiers in that country, and is pushing for more allied …