Weakening Ties That Bind Two founding principles have netted together the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) since its founding in 1981: their collective security and the protection and reliability of oil exports. These interests also served as the linchpin of the GCC states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United […]

Among many difficult options, the least satisfactory would be to keep talking. Israelis and Palestinians failed to reach any kind of agreement before the April 30 deadline set by Secretary of State John Kerry. So, what do the parties and the United States do now? Even before negotiations ended, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and President […]

Settlements and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state are symbolic of the distrust between Israelis and Palestinians. The older of these two challenges resurfaced only recently in the now “suspended” negotiations between the two sides but, in fact, has been at the core of Israeli aspirations since the dawn of the Zionist movement in the […]

 There is simply no justification for Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.   The erroneous rationalization offered for Russia’s annexation of Crimea proceeds along one or more of the following lines: 1: The US, NATO and other Western governments left Vladimir Putin and Russia no choice. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO aggressively […]

Is the Crimea crisis a sign of a return to the Great Game or the Cold War? The crisis in the Crimea Autonomous Republic of Ukraine, wrought by the recent fall of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president and subsequent introduction of Russian troops in Crimea, revives memories of the 19th century’s Great Game, which pitted the Russian […]