Turkey’s election results came as a disappointment not only to Turkish voters who wanted to bring an end to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20 years of increasingly autocratic rule. They also dashed the hopes of many outside observers that Turkey would become one of the countries where the global drift to autocracy begins to reverse.
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe.” It comes at a time when the prospects for peace are particularly dim, with internal political challenges on both sides and recurrent violence punctuated by periodic outbreaks of heavier fighting.
The Arab League announced the immediate reinstatement of Syria as a member on Sunday, opening the door to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s participation in the league’s upcoming summit on May 19. The diplomatic breakthrough affirms Assad’s legitimacy and confirms the acceptance across the region that he has won Syria’s civil war.
Though the Iran-Saudi Arabia normalization deal was mediated by China, Baghdad played an important role in pushing it across the finish line. That diplomatic initiative reflects Iraq’s broader efforts toward regional reintegration, which has been a key priority, not least because regional animosities often play out inside Iraq.
Despite minimal payoff from U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East last summer, Washington has nonetheless scored some diplomatic wins over the past year. But the gains Washington has made have now run into significant yet predictable headwinds, highlighting the difficulties facing Biden’s regional agenda.
The U.S. military commitment to the Middle East has long been a core principle of U.S. foreign policy, stemming from the conviction that it keeps the region from falling into chaos and that a retreat would embolden enemies there and around the world. But the world is changing, and so should U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
A controversy over a Netflix docudrama about Cleopatra escalated last week, when the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities asserted that Cleopatra was fair-skinned. The statement capped two weeks of debate about her ethnicity, after Netflix cast a mixed-race British actress in the leading role for “Queen Cleopatra.”
On March 21, nine Algerian migrants died when the boat taking them to Italy capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. The tragedy highlights the cost of migration, which is not limited to lives lost. The highly publicized reports of migrant deaths have increasingly shaped a vision of migration as a symptom of a broader social tragedy.