Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH)

Philip Carl Salzman’s post about President Obama’s statement on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran suggests that the president is dangerously naïve about the Iranian regime’s aims. Salzm...

From Philip Carl Salzman “It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.” —President Barack Obama, statement on the 30th anniv...

From Adam Garfinkle As President Obama decides how to proceed in the Afghan war, he needs to add one more variable that is rarely mentioned: Iranian determination to acquire nuclear weapons...

Walter Laqueur’s paper on Russia’s Muslim strategy provides us with another example of the insightful analysis which we have long grown to expect from him. In...

From Raymond Tanter The role of Iran in fueling insurgency in Iraq, particularly attacks against U.S. forces, has been well-documented and forms one front in Iran’s proxy war against the United States. ...

From Alan Dowty As the Goldstone report on the Gaza war wends it way up the UN food chain, casting further opprobrium on Israel at each level, it is legitimate to question Israel’s handling of this challenge. Did the Israeli response lessen or aggravate the damage? ...

From MESH Admin Walter Laqueur contributes a new paper to MESH’s Middle East Papers series, on Russia’s Muslim strategy. That strategy, barely coherent, is riddled with contradictions, as Russia vacillates between resentment of the American-led world order and fear of an ascendant Islam. Fo...

From Mark T...

From Soner Cagaptay Turkey’s ties with its neighbors have been transformed since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power almost seven years ago in November 2002. Some analysts have described the AKP’s foreign policy as a “zero problems with neighbors” approach. Under ...

From Robert Satloff On Saturday, October 17, at The Washington Institute’s annual Weinberg Founders Conference at Lansdowne, I was privileged to serve as master of ceremonies for the announcement of our second annual Book Prize for outstanding books on the Middle East published in the previous y...

When “L’Affaire Hala” broke a number of weeks ago, it was hard to be surprised. The Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate along with their brethren in the Writers Union and other professionals in the arts, culture, and sciences have long held the line against contacts with Israelis. The as...

From J. Scott Carpenter The Obama administration has finally woken up to the fact that Iraqi parliamentary elections scheduled for January 16 are in real danger of not taking place as scheduled...

From Michael Reynolds The past several days have witnessed not one but two momentous, even stunning, developments in Turkish foreign policy that are reverberating through the region. Both are the work of Ahmet Davutoğlu, a former university professor who became Turkish foreign minister last year....

It might be useful to pinpoint the intellectual sources of the inaccurate analogy between Hezbollah and the Taliban. While we cannot say for sure, the views attributed to “White House advisers” in the Washington Post report sound familiar. Si...