Middle East & North Africa Archive

The potential long-term impact of the Libya intervention has more to do with changing people’s thinking than with changing the reality on the ground in Libya. The past 40 years have already demonstrated that the West can manage the discrete problem represented by Moammar Gadhafi. What it cannot handle is the aggregate problem represented by a continuation of the status quo, both in the broader region but also in the shifting geopolitical landscape beyond it. By highlighting a number of major shortcomings in that status quo, the Libyan intervention just might be the wake-up call needed to generate a more […]

Turkey’s evolving response to the Libyan crisis is just the “latest indication of its goal to be a power broker on the world stage,” the Associated Press reported earlier this week. Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the Turkish government has “always thought that in the past, the Turks have punched well below their weight.” “Now, with the Turkish economy doing very well, as the 16th-largest economy in the world . . . Turkey is much more able to play an international role, especially in the Caucusus and […]

The United States spends around $40 billion to $50 billion per year to protect the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the global economy, more than the entire defense budgets of all but a few countries. China, by comparison, spends virtually nothing on Gulf security, while pursuing its strategy of building political and economic relations with oil-rich countries in order to secure oil for its growing economy. This is nowhere more apparent than in China’s relations with Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil power. Beijing’s focus on the Persian Gulf began in earnest in 1978, when it […]

The announcement this week that the United States is effectively pulling its longtime support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in favor of political transition in Yemen have spawned a fresh wave of reports about the threat of al-Qaida in the country. The country’s political tumult has prompted many Yemeni military troops to abandon their posts, while others have been summoned to the capital, according to the New York Times, which reports that the resulting power vacuum is being filled by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The extent and true nature of the al-Qaida threat in Yemen, however, continue to […]

The ebb and flow of the Libyan civil war has led most American and European commentators to draw two conclusions. First, the conflict will end with a negotiated settlement. Second, international peacekeepers may be required to make any deal work. The case for a negotiated settlement is based on the simple fact that a military solution to the crisis is unlikely: The rebels probably cannot win on the battlefield, and Col. Moammar Gadhafi cannot be allowed to do so. A stalemate is also unappealing, not least because it would require the U.S. and Europeans to continue policing Libya’s airspace, at […]

Scottish politician Alex Salmond has confirmed that prosecutors in Scotland are asking the British Foreign Office for permission to interview former Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa, one of Muammar Gadaffi’s closest confidants who defected to the United Kingdom this week.