Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi attends a summit of Gulf Arab leaders in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, May 30, 2019 (AP photo by Amr Nabil).

Editor’s Note: Every Monday, Managing Editor Frederick Deknatel highlights a major unfolding story in the Middle East, while curating some of the best news and analysis from the region. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. It wasn’t ever that clear why Egypt was going along with the Saudi- and Emirati-led blockade of Qatar, beyond some well-known disagreements over the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, the blockade was ultimately an economic pressure campaign by those two very wealthy Gulf monarchies, with the help of fellow Gulf Cooperation Council member Bahrain, to isolate their […]

Posters of veteran politician Gideon Saar at a voting center in the northern Israeli city of Hadera, Dec. 26, 2019 (AP photo by Ariel Schalit).

Following a one-year respite, Israeli voters will head back to the polls on March 23 for their fourth election in two years. While trying to break Israel’s political gridlock is by now well-trodden ground, the upcoming contest will differ in one key way from the three that took place between April 2019 and March 2020. In those elections, the main alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party was the newly formed Blue and White, a party led by former military chief Benny Gantz that did not have a clear ideological agenda or makeup. This time, however, […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, center left, enter a hall for talks, in the Kremlin, Moscow, Russia, June 5, 2019 (AP photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko).

The last time China’s most famous billionaire, Jack Ma, was seen in public was October. It was an appearance that did not please the regime in Beijing. The founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba—something of a Chinese Jeff Bezos—may have grown too confident and too powerful for the Chinese Communist Party, which may have decided it was time to not just silence him and limit his power, but to send a message to other potential critics with wealth and influence. It would not be the first time that China has used repressive tactics to put elites in their place. And it […]

Leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council following their summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 10, 2019 (AP photo by Amr Nabil).

Saudi Arabia and three of its Gulf allies have agreed to end a three-and-a-half-year travel and trade blockade on neighboring Qatar. The deal was announced last week at a summit of the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC. But the embargo has done lasting damage to the bloc, says Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, and “there’s a lot of work to be done” to address persistent divisions within the GCC countries. Vakil joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to talk about how the Gulf states can move forward after years of […]

Secretary General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, Nayef Falah Al-Hajraf, left, and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud at the 41st GCC meeting in Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 5, 2021 (AP photo by Amr Nabil).

Flights between Saudi Arabia and Qatar are resuming this week and the land border has reopened between the two countries—signs of a thaw in relations after three and half years of acrimony. Last week, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt agreed to end a travel and trade blockade they had imposed on Qatar in 2017. Those four countries, calling themselves the “anti-terror quartet,” had accused Qatar of supporting radical Islamist groups, among other charges. The crisis had divided the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, and the United States had lobbied extensively for an end to the […]

A Trump flag left behind by his supporters following the riot at the Capitol, Washington, Jan. 6, 2021 (AP photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta).

Editor’s Note: Middle East Memo will be off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day next week. It will return Jan. 25. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Middle East Memo by email every week. When President Donald Trump’s radical supporters stormed the Capitol building last week, attacking police and rampaging through the halls of Congress, hunting for lawmakers, many American news networks were quick to make breathless comparisons to somewhere else. This wasn’t Washington, they intimated; it was more like a scene out of Baghdad, or Beirut. Van Jones, the former Obama administration official who is now a […]

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani gives a press conference in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 16, 2020 (AP photo by Ebrahim Noroozi).

Just days into the new year, Iran announced that “a couple of hours ago,” it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent—a level that experts say would put it within a six-month sprint of converting its entire nuclear stockpile to bomb-grade material. Tehran’s move Monday raises the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden, whose administration now has no time to waste in facing an adversary signaling that it has no intention of warmly embracing Biden’s diplomatic outreach. Iran is raising the stakes for Biden in the waning days of the Trump administration, trying to set the timetable for nuclear negotiations even […]

Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, Aug. 25, 2016 (pool photo by Kayhan Ozer for Presidential Press Service, via AP).

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office later this month, many U.S. allies and partners are eyeing an opportunity for better relations with Washington. But Turkey, under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will face an uphill battle to settle its ongoing disputes with the United States, not to mention its other NATO allies. There are three major impediments to a reset in Turkey’s ties with the West. First, the U.S. remains at loggerheads with Turkey over Erdogan’s decision to purchase an advanced missile defense system from Russia. Second, the European Union is considering tough sanctions against Ankara […]

President-elect Joe Biden speaks in Wilmington, Delaware, Dec. 28, 2020 (AP photo by Andrew Harnik).

VIENNA—As the clock ticks down to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration this month, hopes are high that he will rejoin and preserve key arms control agreements that were abandoned or neglected by the outgoing president, Donald Trump. If Biden can successfully reverse course, it will go a long way to restoring America’s credibility, given that Trump has “bankrupted the United States’ word in the world,” as Biden put it in Foreign Affairs last March. “On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated,” he wrote. But how straightforward […]

Supporters of the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces commemorate the anniversary of the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Najaf, Iraq, Jan. 4, 2021 (AP photo by Anmar Khalil).

The U.S.S. Nimitz was leaving the Middle East, until it wasn’t. The Pentagon’s abrupt reversal of its move late last week to send the aircraft carrier home is the latest sign of an ominous standoff with Iran in the last, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency. A year ago, Trump ordered the brazen drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Fears that it would start a full-fledged war dissipated after Iran made a calculated show of retaliation, firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. There were no […]