Ever since it became a rising economic power, China started to realize the need for soft power in order to increase its global competitiveness. In Africa, Beijing found itself competing with Western companies backed by development agencies imposing good governance and human rights restrictions. Beijing sought to appeal to some African nations by offering to […]
Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. Dr. Cagaptay has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals as well as key American and Turkish media outlets. He writes regularly as a columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and […]
The U.S. should not help Shia Islamists to the detriment of Sunni Islamists. The U.S. should support toleration and moderation in Iraq. Their current policies don’t do this. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently stated that it would be a serious mistake to ease pressure on Iran in the nuclear talks in exchange for help […]
Last week, three young Israeli Yeshiva students (two 16-year-olds and a 19-year-old) were kidnapped. They were tremping in the West Bank. Tremping is easily translated into English as hitchhiking, but it typically lacks the questionable connotations which that word can conjure in America, at least after “the Summer of Love.” The story is ongoing and […]
Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a prominent Middle East scholar at Bar Ilan University, told an audience at the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel that the United States made a great mistake by not dividing Iraq into three states, one Kurdish, one Sunni, and one Shia. He believes that this mistake led to a situation […]
With the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) pressing now toward Baghdad, Iraq’s only hope in the chance of a more inclusive government is to move toward a coalition embracing all of the country’s religious and ethnic groups. But with suspicion and hatred in Iraq running deep, it’s easier said than done, and […]
I have been recently asked by LinkedIn to contribute writing for the professional social networking site. So, for my first piece I decided to write the following on the worsening situation in Iraq. The piece can be accessed in its entirety here. The crumbling of government authority in Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq under the alarming onslaught […]
By now, everyone has heard about the abduction of three Israeli teenagers on Thursday night in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank. Everyone has heard the reports about one of the kidnapped teenagers calling Israeli police shortly after being kidnapped to ask for help and the slow response of the Israeli police. Everyone […]
The current crisis in Ukraine is a game changer for Europe. While it has reignited a necessary public debate about collective measures to ensure Europe’s security, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) immediate neighborhood has witnessed a considerable worsening of security conditions for some time.
As a former detractor who has not been a fan of the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward Somalia, it is an overstatement to say that I watched Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman’s speech on June 3 with certain level of skepticism. Of course, nothing more than that healthy dose necessary in […]
Levana Zamir, the head of the International Association of Jews from Egypt, stressed that Sisi is bringing Egypt in a more cosmopolitan and less hateful direction. She believes that it is good for everyone that he is Egypt’s President. Levana Zamir, the head of the International Association of Jews from Egypt, told the Foreign Policy […]
While no road to democracy is smooth, Libya has seen its fair share of upheaval since the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 helped bust open the Arab Spring. Discord has escalated in the last month, threatening rule of law and the transitional government’s legitimacy. Let’s go back to May 4, 2014, when Libya’s General […]
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