Middle East & North Africa Archive

As 2014 begins, there is no shortage of conflict around the world. For sheer political drama, though, nothing compares to the events unfolding in Turkey, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stands at the center of a high-intensity feud that is slowly tearing apart the once wide-ranging coalition that made him enormously powerful. A corruption investigation reaching into the highest levels of government has brought into the open a festering feud among rival Islamist groups. Every day brings new revelations involving some of the country’s most prominent figures, and each day the stakes grow. With every move, the question on […]

President Barack Obama, according to pundits, is losing the Middle East. The charge recalls those leveled after Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war, when anti-communists in the United States accused the Truman administration of “losing China.” While advocates of this position never explained how any feasible level of U.S. support could have staved off Chiang Kai-Shek’s defeat, the idea that refusing to back friendly dictators leads to preventable strategic disasters subsequently became ingrained in American thinking. It later inspired Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to disengage from Vietnam even when it became clear that the Saigon regime could not […]

It is an absolute certainty that 2014 will be a turbulent year for the United Nations. The organization is struggling with crises ranging from the chaos in the Central African Republic (CAR) to the plight of Syrian refugees. There is little hope that these challenges will dissipate soon. Yet two sets of peace talks this month could well decide whether the U.N. faces a truly dreadful year ahead, or just a very difficult one. The first is already underway in Addis Ababa, where emissaries of the South Sudanese government and its opponents may or may not manage to reverse their […]