Middle East

A revamped approach to the alliance should stay focused on shared goals, from ensuring a stable oil market to promoting a more tolerant version of Islam at home and abroad.

The administration's achievements were counterbalanced by a striking lack of alignment among three U.S. national security strategies and the discouraging rapid rise of far-right extremism at home.

Join a live webcast with a senior HSI official, a little-known agency with many unique authorities that is instrumental in solving numerous terrorism cases every year.

Recent gestures, which have included reconciliation talks with Hamas, could strengthen the PA’s Gaza-based rival, further strain relations with its traditional Arab allies, and spur elections with destabilizing results.

The Washington meeting between the United States and Qatar, overlapping with the Israel-UAE signing ceremony on normalization, creates a unique opportunity to resolve the dispute between U.S. allies.

A potential Israeli push to annex parts of the West Bank threatens to upend a reasonably tolerable and surprisingly stable status quo to achieve dubious benefits at significant cost.

The Islamic State no longer governs territory, but aspiring jihadists can now point to a caliphate project achieved in their lifetime, a long-held yearning of the international movement.

Despite long-documented public weariness with Middle East conflicts, Trump’s successor could well recognize the value of reestablishing American credibility in the region.

The current holder of the highest clerical rank in Shia Islam is eighty-nine-year-old Ali al-Sistani, who is based in Najaf, Iraq. Sistani has played an important role in Iraq’s post-Saddam era, supporting political reconciliation and a constitution-based society. While the transnational reach of marjaiya will likely diminish after Sistani leaves the scene, the specific contours of this shift and Tehran's efforts to intervene remain an open question.