Like some of you, I’ve been on the receiving end of an e-mail bombardment from friends who have expressed their shock and dismay over the recent shutdown of the U.S. federal government and the entire political and legislative impasse between the White House and congressional Republicans. I’ve been told by my British, French, and Chinese...

So here we are a year and a half after the start of the protests of Tahrir Square in Cairo, which Tom Friedman and the rest of the Arab Springers had promised would give birth to a New Middle East, where democracy and liberal values would reign from here to eternity, and Arabs and Muslims...

As an American President prepares for his reelection campaign, he has to deal with a complex crisis in the Middle East.  A radical regime is projecting its military power, trying to destabilize the pro-American governments in the Middle East, threatening the state of Israel, and aiming to achieve regional supremacy. America’s allies in the Middle...

Middle East historian William W. Harris described the Levant as the “eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt,” a geographical zone that includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and a “fractured cultural mosaic” of ethnic and religious groups. Modern Syria, the largest Arab state to...

Much of the international politics of the 20th century revolved around the drive for national self-determination, such as that of the Serbs in the Balkans, setting in motion the crises that led to the Great War, or that of the Germans in the Sudetenland, aggravating the tensions that brought about the titanic clash between the...

Neoconservative ideologues have joined liberal internationalists and left-wing global utopians in celebrating the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and the ensuing political uprising in other Arab countries.  Their glee suggests that the Middle East is about to go through the kind of political and economic reforms that have been sweeping the...

In itself, the Israeli military’s raid on the “Free Gaza” aid flotilla was proof, as the astute thinker Forrest Gump put it, that “Stupid is as stupid does.”  The flotilla was sponsored by a mishmash of Western lefty peaceniks and Turkish-backed Islamist groups that were trying, to use historian Daniel Boorstin’s term, to produce a...

When a manufacturing company is confronted with the reality of a huge drop in product sales, the initial reaction on the part of the managers is to blame the marketing department and to demand that it come up with a new and more effective advertising campaign.  After all, the notion that their air-conditioning units are...

In the aftermath of the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the “liberation” of Iraq by U.S. forces, Bush-administration officials who had earlier compared Saddam to Hitler extended that analogy and suggested that postwar Iraq was like post-World War II Germany and Japan and Italy, where the U.S. military occupation helped replace totalitarian regimes with thriving...

Conventional wisdom has it that the recent parliamentary election in Israel has swayed Israeli politics further to the political right.  After all, the balance of power in the 120-member Knesset has shifted quite dramatically.  The political bloc that included the centrist Kadima Party and Labor, which dominated the outgoing government in Jerusalem, was reduced from...

Upon being congratulated for defeating the Romans at Asculum in 279 b.c. during the Pyrrhic War, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had lost half of his army during the battle, said something to the effect of “Another victory like this, and we’re done for.”  Hence the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” which could probably be applied to...

On March 20, President George W. Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war by stating that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was and always will be the right one.  His view is not that of the majority of Americans, who are citing the high costs in American...

Condi Rice had a vision: It was springtime in Pakistan, and love was in the air—which was an ideal time for a chick flick.  From the lady who brought us the Shiite-Sunni Love Fest in Iraq, Fatah-Hamas: Isn’t It Romantic? in Palestine, The Amorous Cedars in Lebanon, not to mention the first season of Democratic...

A day or two after the signing of the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993, I attended a meeting at a think tank in Washington to discuss the economic prospects of an independent Palestinian state.  One of the speakers outlined a very economically bullish vision for the new Palestine—the West Bank plus the Gaza Strip. ...

Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, D.C., that focused on the dilemmas involved in the expansion of NATO.  One of the American speakers, referring to the membership of the small Baltic nation of Estonia in the U.S.-led security organization, expressed concern that the Estonians could force the Americans into a military confrontation with the...

Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending.  Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...

After Hamas, the radical Islamic and anti-Western movement and terrorist organization, achieved victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I was invited by a leading think tank in Washington to debate with another Middle East analyst the implications of that stunning development for U.S. policy in the Middle East and the moribund “peace process.” I found...

The neoconservative ideology of Western (preferably American) democracy and free markets is a form of secular religion.  The door to this secular church begins to open to the sinner when he starts surfing the internet, watching CNN, eating at McDonald’s, and reading the gospel according to Tom Friedman.  And he (“or she”—adding that is itself...