Middle East & North Africa Archive

Americans generally don’t think much about where their nation’s military bases are located around the world, but they probably should. For most of the past century, a pillar of U.S. strategy has been to address threats and defeat enemies as far away from the homeland as possible. This makes security partnerships and forward presence important. And that requires bases. During the Cold War, stationing military forces abroad was a sign of commitment to allies, assuring them that America would be there if they were attacked. This helped deter aggressors. If deterrence failed, the thinking went, foreign bases would make it […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. Just days before the recent NATO summit in Brussels, Turkey moved to block Austria’s involvement in alliance operations, the latest example of how Turkey’s various rifts with European countries threaten alliance cohesiveness. Turkey’s relationship with NATO is also being tested by divergent views on how best to combat the self-styled Islamic State. In an email interview, Emre Caliskan, a Turkish analyst and co-author of “The New Turkey and Its Discontents,” describes Turkey’s traditional role in NATO and how it might […]

Demonstrations are continuing across Morocco in the wake of the arrest of a number of popular leaders of an emergent social justice movement. Despite the government crackdown, protests against corruption and unfair privilege—known as “hogra” in the local Darija dialect of Arabic—have steadily unfolded in the city of Al-Hoceima on the northern Mediterranean coast. Last week, they spread to the capital, Rabat, and the main commercial hub, Casablanca. Located in Morocco’s mountainous Rif region, Al-Hoceima has been at the center of the protest movement, known as al-Hirak al-Shaabi, or the Popular Movement, which has developed over the past seven months […]

Bahrain’s political scene has never been defined by the presence of a robust opposition. But the dissolution last Wednesday of Waad, a major secular opposition group, took an ongoing crackdown to new heights. Waad was hardly the first opposition movement to be targeted; one year ago, for example, the government suspended the activities of al-Wefaq, at the time Bahrain’s main Shiite political party. But Waad will likely be the last opposition group to endure the government’s wrath for a while, by virtue of the fact that it was the only one left. Waad was a fixture of the pro-democracy protests […]

Last month, at a ceremony in Toulouse, France, the French firm ATR officially gave four passenger planes to Iran, and the planes were flown to Tehran the following day. The ATR 72-600s are the first of a 20-plane deal made with the firm following the 2015 nuclear deal and lifting of sanctions, according to the Associated Press, and their purchase is part of a larger effort by Iran to update its commercial fleet. In an email interview, Bijan Khajehpour, managing partner of the Vienna-based consulting firm Atieh International, describes the current needs of Iran’s aviation sector as well as the […]

Since the collapse of world oil prices in 2014, the wealthy Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf have all faced difficult times, but especially Oman. Last month, things got even worse when Standard & Poor’s downgraded Oman’s credit rating to junk status over concerns with the country’s budget and revenue prospects as oil prices stay low. After recording average budgetary surpluses of 9.7 percent of GDP in the 2000s, Oman has seen fiscal deficits of 1.1 percent of GDP in 2014, 15.1 percent in 2015 and 20.6 percent in 2016. Unless oil prices increase significantly, the country will face the […]

With multiple conflicts raging in the Middle East, the last thing the region needed was yet another vitriolic confrontation bursting to the surface. But that is precisely what has transpired in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia. Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by Riyadh, are fuming at the GCC’s maverick member, Qatar, in the aftermath of a very odd chain of events. For now, the clashes have been limited to a war of words, mostly in the media. But the temperature is high, and the crisis has proven remarkable for its failure to […]