As unrest simmers in the Middle East and the United States edges toward detente with Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia are trying to ride out the storm together.
In a Changing Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia Cling Together
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United States
NSA Surveillance’s Cost-Benefit Ratio
Massive data collection by the NSA comes down much heavier on the cost side of the ledger than the benefit.
Obama Administration Actually Doesn’t Want Too Good a Nuclear Deal With Iran
Another Iranian overture spurned.
Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence
No one knows what a major state would be like if it radically cut back its intelligence services–but based on the recent American record, it’s hard to imagine we could be anything but better off.
Seeing Past “Death to America”: A Conversation with Hooman Majd
Iranian-American author Hooman Majd says that Americans are starting to see Iran as more than “just a bunch of crazy mullahs shouting ‘Death to America’ all the time.”
How We Got Here: A History of Missed Opportunities with Iran
Iran has been willing to deal for at least a decade. Why are there still calls for more sanctions?
America Under Assault
We often hear of U.S. guns turning up at crimes scenes abroad. But we rarely hear about how many foreign-made guns find their way to the United States.
What if They Held a Wake and Nobody Came?
It often occurs to me that the fellow who wrote the book some years back about learning everything worthwhile at his mother’s knee had a very good point about foreign policy. We are trained and brainwashed to believe, of course, that foreign policy is too complicated...
Perpetual War: How Does the Global War on Terror Ever End?
This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books. On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he...
Foreign Policy Thin-Sliced (11/1)
“Iranian regime may be too fragmented to come to a consensus” “Anytime you see a statement coming out of the government, just remember there’s a rat’s nest of people fighting underneath the surface,” Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied Iran...