Saudi Arabia recently rejected a coveted seat on the U.N. Security Council it had campaigned for over two years to get. The sense of surprise in the policy analysis world has been palpable, with analysts scratching their heads trying to understand why the oil-rich...
Hardliners in Tehran are not happy with the recent rapprochement between the United States and Iran and the related progress in negotiations to address Western concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. But the bigger threat may come from hardliners in the...
To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest...
As the U.S. and its allies prepare for another round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, powerful and wealthy opponents—from the halls of Congress to Middle East capitols—are maneuvering to torpedo them. At stake is the real possibility of a war with...
The Middle East is normally a depressing topic of conversation with talk of ongoing wars, repressive governments, ethnic violence, and terrorist attacks. Yet two of the region’s most troublesome challenges (Syria and Iran) are on diplomatic tracks toward peaceful...
Last weekend, Kenya’s preeminent newspaper The Nation, reported that CCTV footage showed Kenyan soldiers looting during the terrorist attack in Westgate Mall. The “Shame of Soldiers Looting Westgate,” as The Nation dubbed the footage, may be allegorical for increased...
Several months ago, even the most politically engaged Americans had probably never heard of either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). That was no longer the case after August 21, when news broke of...
As you have no doubt heard by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was informed by German intelligence that her phone was subjected to American surveillance. Predictably she reacted badly and called President Obama himself to ream him out. At the New York Times,...
In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to...
In a Boston Review article titled The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Nasser Hussain attempts to … provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on...