Talk of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been heating up in recent weeks, with American officials visiting Riyadh to hammer out the terms of an agreement and Saudi and Israeli leaders sounding optimistic. But how close to such a deal are we really? Joshua Teitelb ...Show more
Degrading and Destroying the Islamic State
After the Islamic State seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2013-14, the United States led a yearslong effort to roll back the group’s gains. Journalist and author Michael Gordon has written four books on the wars in Iraq, and in his latest, Degrade and Destroy, he takes us ...Show more
Al-Qaeda’s Afflictions
The special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 yielded a massive trove of documents never intended for publication, but in 2017 the CIA declassified them in their entirety. Nelly Lahoud, a scholar at New America, has written the first history of al-Qaeda based on ...Show more
The Saudi Climbdown and the Iranian Shakedown
Big things are shaping up in the Middle East as the Biden administration appears to be rethinking its get-tough policy on Saudi Arabia, even as it continues to hold out hope for a revived nuclear deal with Iran. Meanwhile, Russia looks poised to shut down a key humanitarian aid c ...Show more
The Syria-Ukraine Nexus
In September 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria to save the regime of dictator Bashar al-Asad. President Obama predicted a “quagmire,” but that is not what followed. What is the nexus between the Russian intervention in Syria and the more recent Russian “special military ...Show more