The centuries turn over, the big players evolve, the local battlefields change, but the results remain the same: when external military powers intervene in the Middle East to secure their national interests, the result is inevitably local chaos that also generates retaliations an

The fall of Aleppo to the coalition of Syrian-Iranian-Russian-Hizbollah forces this week is likely to be a symbolic and historical turning point amidst different eras.How events play themselves out will be determined in the same way as events in Syria have been determined: by the

The Middle East-related policy world of former and hopeful officials, think tanks, analysts, scholars and researchers in the United States that I have followed at close range over the past three months is more turbulent than ever, given the Donald Trump presidential victory and t

The election of Donald Trump as the next American president has opened the floodgates to wild expectations, exaggerated hopes, much speculation and a range of conflicting emotions.These include hope, prosperity and family security at one end, and terrible fears, racism and hatred

The election of Donald Trump as the next American president has added a major new element of uncertainty to a Middle Eastern picture that had already achieved its highest state of confusion, violence and uncertainty in its modern history.The factors that will determine the polici

During the last two months of my current stay in the United States, I have followed the presidential contest while seeking insights into the issues, personalities and values at play, and any glimpses of what the candidates portend for US foreign policy — a reasonable venture on m

The election on Monday of Michel Aoun as Lebanon’s president tells us much about how political power and state governance systems operate across the Arab world.His election should be analysed as a fascinating anthropological event about how the political beasts operate in the jun

Senior colonels and generals in the United States armed forces have more rational views of the conditions around the Middle East than their civilian politician commanders who send them to war there — and send them again a decade later, and once again two decades later, as has bee

The battle for Mosul that has been unleashed this week will focus much attention in the immediate future on a set of conditions that are particular to northern Iraq.Yet, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the evolution of Mosul and post-Mosul capture a set of common c