The Egyptian and Syrian presidential elections have a few things in common.

Egyptians have confused and confounded their rulers by failing to turn out as expected in this week’s presidential election, the second since the toppling of president Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for 30 years, in 2011. Many did not vote because the landslide victory of fo

Ahead of next week’s presidential election in Egypt, former US president Jimmy Carter warned that that country’s transition to democracy “has stalled and stands on the precipice of total reversal”. Carter was wrong because Egypt never managed to launch th

During a recent visit to the US, I discovered that several relatives I used to consider “genetic Republicans” now back the Democratic Party even though they are not convinced that President Barack Obama is doing a good job. “Genetic Republicans” are peopl

From 1949 until January 1979, the US recognised Taiwan as the legitimate government of China because the politicians in Washington could not bring themselves to accept that their right-wing Chinese nationalist friends had lost the war with the communists led by Mao Zedong. Taiwa

Having failed to find a “moderate” Syrian insurgent faction, the US seems to have encouraged a young commander to create one to receive a shipment of TOW anti-tank missiles, in the desperate belief that others could break with the radical fundamentalist factions that

During my recent visits to Beirut and Damascus, unidentified sources I interviewed revealed uncomfortable truths that the Western powers and their allies are determined to conceal or ignore. The hullabaloo raised about Syria’s declaration that it intends to hold its presid

The lifting of a militia blockade on two of Libya’s oil terminals has eased the crisis in that country and ended Tripoli’s threat to dispatch forces to Benghazi. The terminals at Zueitina, south of Benghazi, and Hariga, to the east, have been handed over to the gover

The triumph of Turkey’s fundamentalist Freedom and Development Party (AKP) in local elections is bad news for both Syria and Cyprus. The AKP’s success is certain to embolden Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stand for president in the country’s first presi