MADRID: After long years of failed international efforts to end Iran's cunning drive to develop nuclear weapons, the question today is no longer whether the West can prevent the nuclearization of Iran's military arsenal, but whether the Islamic (...)
MADRID: The English author and priest William Ralph Inge once said that “A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.” Syria's Assad dynasty, however, seems to believe that it can defy that dictum.
Historically, few (...)
MADRID: The folding of the American flag in Iraq amid a collapse of public security and a severe crisis in the country's fragile political order seals a tragic chapter in the history of the United States. It marked the denouement of one of the (...)
MADRID: How revolutions unfold depends on many factors, including a country's socio-economic structure, its particular historical traditions, and sometimes the role of foreign powers. So the Arab Spring was never expected to be a linear process, or (...)
TEL AVIV: The somber spectacle of Israel's isolation during the United Nations debate on Palestinian statehood marks the political tsunami that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's critics warned would arrive if Israel did not propose a bold peace (...)
MADRID: Twenty-five years ago, at a summit in Rejkjavik, Iceland, US President Ronald Reagan stunned the world and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, by proposing global and comprehensive elimination of all nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, (...)
MADRID: Whether or not the Arab Spring will usher in credible democracies across the Arab world remains uncertain. But, while the dust has not yet settled after months of turmoil in Tunis, Cairo, and elsewhere, the Arab revolts have already had a (...)
TEL AVIV: The old vocation of what Rudyard Kipling called the “White Man's Burden” — the driving idea behind the West's quest for global hegemony from the days of imperial expansion in the nineteenth century to the current, pathetically (...)
TEL AVIV: Binyamin Netanyahu's furious rejection of US President Barack Obama's proposal to use the 1967 borders as the basis for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — frontiers that he called “utterly indefensible” — reflects (...)
JERUSALEM: The Arab revolt against inertia, despair, and decline has rightly inspired the admiration of civilized people everywhere — everywhere, that is, except in Israel. The fall of corrupt Arab dictatorships is being met in Israel with profound (...)
MADRID: The attack by a Western-led alliance on Muammar Gaddafi's forces in Libya is driven largely by principled motives. Had it turned its back on the Libyan rebels, the West would have betrayed its very identity.
Of course, the same principles (...)
TEL AVIV: Revolutions throughout history have proven to devour their children. Their final outcomes are seldom congruent with their prime movers' intentions. Too frequently, revolutions are hijacked by a second wave, either more conservative or more (...)
TEL AVIV: It should be clear to all by now that talks between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu cannot produce a peace agreement. Yet it would be wrong to dwell excessively on current leaders' (...)
MADRID: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that was reached in 2005 between mostly Christian southern Sudan and the country's Muslim North, ended one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern times. Lasting 22 years, that war left more than two (...)
MADRID: Humbled by the Republicans' landslide mid-term election victory, US President Barack Obama will now need to negotiate every minor detail of his domestic agenda with a confrontational Congress — at least until the next elections in 2012. (...)
MADRID: Diplomacy is not having its finest hour nowadays. Quite the contrary: resistance to diplomatic solutions is a common thread in most of today's major conflicts.
Afghanistan will continue to bleed until the allies finally recognize that (...)
MADRID: Since its inception in Oslo almost two decades ago, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been stymied by the dysfunctional political systems of both sides. Hostage of an impossible coalition and of a settlement movement of free-lance (...)
MADRID: Trapped since the 1960's in a protracted armed conflict with the most unscrupulous militias imaginable, and hostage to drug lords who turned the country's vast rural areas into fiefdoms of crime and untold atrocities, Colombia long projected (...)
TEL AVIV: Twenty years after the Madrid Peace conference, and 10 years after President Bill Clinton's heroic efforts at Camp David failed to yield a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, one cannot escape the conclusion that the (...)
TEL AVIV: The deadly fiasco of the Turkish-led “peace flotilla” to Gaza highlighted the deepening strain in the Israeli-Turkish alliance. But it mainly helped expose the deeper, underlying reasons for Turkey's shift from its Western orientation (...)
SANTO DOMINGO: The $5 billion in short-term aid for Haiti, and the $10 billion pledged for its long-term reconstruction at the International Donors' Conference on March 31, is a vote of confidence in the potential of collective international action. (...)
TEL AVIV: Saturated with their often tragic history, Jews tend to pay great reverence to the past. But the past, especially when not handled with care, can be the enemy of the future and distort our reading of the challenges of the present. This is (...)
TEL AVIV: The policy of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government on Jerusalem is ill conceived. This was amply demonstrated by the announcement of the construction of 1,600 new apartments in the occupied eastern part of the city during (...)
TEL AVIV: Across the Middle East, a fatalistic conventional wisdom is taking hold: war is unavoidable. Some see war as a way of resolving an increasingly deadlocked situation, shaking up a dysfunctional regional order whose main actors are not only (...)
MADRID: Barack Obama's first year in office has been a sobering exercise in the limits of presidential power. It also carries lessons about how the resilient and impersonal forces of history can constrain any leader's drive for change. Obama's (...)