Current Journal
Editor's Note - Fall 2020
As we go to press, this election season’s foreign-policy surprise is wearing off but still reverberating: two small Arab states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Bahrain, have agreed to “normalize” relations with Israel, an eventuality anticipated by Ahmed Hashim in our lead article, “Security and Defense in Small States” (p.
Symposium — Progress or Conflict? What to Expect for U.S. Policy In the Middle East
Anne Patterson / Mara Rudman / Sanam Vakil / F. Gregory Gause, III
The following is a transcript of the 101th in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The event took place on July 17, 2020, via Zoom with Council Vice-Chair Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley moderating, Council President Richard J. Schmierer contributing and Council Executive Director Thomas R. Mattair serving as discussant.
Security & Defense in Small States: Qatar, the UAE and Singapore
Ahmed S. Hashim
The international system is characterized by vast disparities in power, and small states are more likely to be reduced to insignificance or to suffer “state death” than larger ones.1 Over the course of history, small states have disappeared in a number of ways: some have been absorbed into a larger entity, others carved up by two or more powerful states. During the Peloponnesian War, little Melos was defeated and doubly eradicated, both as a state and a nation. Its men were killed, and its women and children sold into slavery by the vastly more powerful Athens.
Kuwaiti Policy toward the “Qatar Crisis” Preview
Faisal Mukhyat Abu Sulaib
GCC Youth Survey Report Preview
Bayly Winder
The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan and Lebanon: Impact and Implications Preview
Juline Beaujouan and Amjed Rasheed
Iran’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East: A Grand Strategy Preview
Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Reza Chitsazian
Iranian-Israeli Confrontation: The Cyber Domain Preview
Gawdat Bahgat
Turkey’s Battle with Covid-19: A Multifaceted Investigation Preview
Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, Taptuk Emre Erkoc, Salih Dogan
Keeping the Soldiers at Bay: Coup-Proofing Strategies in Turkey Preview
Murat Ülgül and Sertif Demir
Who Defeated ISIS? The Pentagon’s War Maps Preview
Brian Glyn Williams
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East
In this highly readable and insightful work, the Dutch-Lebanese writer Kim Ghattas traces the history of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and South Asia in the decades since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Political Economies of the Middle East and North Africa
Adam Smith was not an economist. He was a moral philosopher who pioneered a young discipline in the late eighteenth century that would develop by leaps and bounds in the nineteenth: political economy. One cannot get a degree in it anymore.
Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
In the years between the 2003 Iraq War and the 2020 Covid-19 crisis, the international system faced a number of stresses: renewed geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia, waves of refugees rivaling the numbers displaced during World War II