New York Times columnist Tom Friedman outraged many readers when he wrote an opinion piece on 12 April calling on US President Donald Trump to “back off fighting territorial ISIS [the Islamic State (IS) group] in Syria.” The reason he gave for that (...)
The first public pronouncements by US President Donald Trump on Iran have created the widespread impression that the US will adopt a much more aggressive posture towards the Islamic Republic than under former president Barack Obama's (...)
A new coalition of US-based organisations is pushing for a more aggressive US intervention against the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. But both the war in Syria and politics in the United States have shifted dramatically against this (...)
Post-election comments on Middle East policy last week by US President-elect Donald Trump and one of his campaign advisers have provoked speculation about whether Trump will upend two main foreign policy lines of the former Obama administration in (...)
The Russian-Syrian bombing campaign in eastern Aleppo in Syria, which has ended at least for the time being, has been described in international press reports as though it were unique in modern military history in its indiscriminateness. In an (...)
With the collapse of the US-Russian ceasefire agreement and the resumption and escalation of the massive Russian bombing campaign in Aleppo, the frustration of hawks in Washington over the failure of the Obama administration to use American military (...)
The memorandum by 51 State Department officials calling for US military intervention in Syria last week has been treated in news media coverage as a case of dissent from existing Syria policy by individual officials involved in Syria policy.
But the (...)
When Russian President Vladimir Putin had a substantive meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry last week, it was an extremely rare departure from normal protocol. There was some political logic to the meeting, however, because Putin and Kerry (...)
The arrival of “implementation day” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and Western powers over Iran's nuclear programme, the central elements of which went into affect earlier this month, has made the agreement a fact of life in (...)
The anti-Assad coalition led by the United States continues to stagger towards the supposed objective of beginning peace negotiations between the Syrian government and what has now been blessed as the politically acceptable “opposition”. The first (...)
In the wake of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist attack on Paris, President Barack Obama declared that his administration has the right strategy on IS and will “see it through”.
But the administration is already shifting its policy to cooperate more (...)
I have always been enthusiastic in my support for peace negotiations. All too often, such negotiations have been neglected in internal and international conflicts. But it is clear that the international conference on Syria, which held its first (...)
The US response to Russia's military campaign in Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has struck a pose of moral superiority, arguing that the Russians have not been targeting the Islamic State (IS) group but the non-IS Syrian (...)
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's address at the UN General Assembly and a talk the previous night to about 150 Americans framed the recent nuclear breakthrough as a precedent for further diplomatic accommodation with the United States. But both (...)
New evidence has now surfaced from former Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak that Israel came close to attacking Iran three times over the past few years, if you believe what the major news media have reported.
But you shouldn't believe it. The (...)
If and when the Iran nuclear agreement gets through the US Congress, many people in Washington hope that US President Barack Obama will articulate a more realistic strategy for the Middle East than what we have heard from his administration in the (...)
I'm glad that the United States and Iran reached an agreement in Vienna after nearly two years of negotiations and 35 years of enmity. A failure to do so under present political conditions would certainly have left a festering conflict with (...)
Now that the Iran nuclear deal has been completed, the attention of Western news media and political commentators is predictably focused overwhelmingly on the opposition to the agreement within the US Congress and from Israel and the Saudi-led Sunni (...)
A story published in The Washington Post on 13 June shows how US military service chiefs who make decisions on war policy in light of their own institutional interests prefer an inconclusive war with the Islamic State (IS) group, while maintaining (...)
In the final phase of negotiations with Iran, the US-led international coalition is still seeking Iran's agreement to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit any military facilities it deems suspicious and to interview a (...)
The media coverage of the recent Camp David summit between US President Barack Obama and members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has focused largely on Obama's success in getting the GCC states to go along with the negotiation of a nuclear (...)
The term “proxy war” has been experiencing a new popularity in stories on the Middle East. Various news sources began using the term to describe the conflict in Yemen immediately, as if on cue, after Saudi Arabia launched its bombing campaign (...)
The Framework Agreement, reached last Thursday between Iran and the P5+1 group, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, clearly provides a combination of constraints on Iran's nuclear programme that should reassure all (...)
Western news media has feasted on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's address before the US Congress and the reactions to it. It was a rare political spectacle, rich in personalities in conflict with each other.
But the real story of (...)
The latest public spat between the US Obama administration and the Netanyahu government centres on Israeli leaks of details of the US negotiating position in the Iran nuclear talks and the US consequently reducing its consultation with Israel on the (...)