The U.S. went from having a huge Middle East policy to having a minimal Middle East policy, the pendulum has swung the opposite way toward deliberate avoidance of any kind of vision for the region.

Vali Nasr

Categorized in : Top News

My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply dis... by Vali Nasr

My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience.

my-time administration

What you have in Iraq is not just a society coming apart like Yugoslavia or Congo. What is at stake is not just Iraq's stability but the balance of power in the region.

yugoslavia iraq balance

A timely and incisive look into the history, politics, and future of the Muslim Brotherhood by the foremost expert on Islamism in Egypt. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham has constructed a detailed account of how the Brotherhood confronts the challenges before it, and why and when it embraces change. Everyone concerned with the future of Egypt should read this book.

egypt challenges book

I think President Barack Obama came to office with quite fundamental understandings in his mind about what's possible and what's not possible in the Middle East. The first, I would say, revolutionary breakthrough that he introduced is that the Middle East doesn't matter to American geostrategy as much as we think.

office understanding thinking

President Barack Obama started by accepting the military's counterinsurgency, but came out of Afghanistan having decided that counterinsurgency actually doesn't work.

afghanistan accepting president

The Saudis stated for them the most important issue is Iran and Iranian influence, in fact, they explained the rise of ISIS and the problem in Syria only in terms of the Iranian threat.

Regardless of how much complaining we do about Russian intervention, or how skeptical we are that they can actually succeed, the fact of the matter is that they have taken over the facts on the ground, they have been much more aggressive in talking to everybody and everybody has been willing to talk to them, whereas in the case of the U.S., we have been talking about doing diplomacy but our diplomacy is not actually in practice.

The symbolic impact of making a deal is much bigger in Iran than in the United States, the idea of shaking hands with the so-called Great Satan, arriving at an agreement with them, the symbolism of the foreign minister huddling with the American secretary of state - these really change the entire political narrative in Iran.

The moderates have now delivered a massive victory that had not been possible before, the question is - can they translate this into victory in upcoming polls in Iran?

The key is if they don’t see the dividends of this deal or engagement with the global community then exuberance and expectation can very quickly turn into frustration and anger, and that’s the challenge.

The entire history of this region in the past four decades has been based on the assumption that Iran is outside the region. That there is a tight alliance between Arabs and the United States for managing the Middle East that doesn’t include Iran.

Clearly in a frozen relationship, either they're kept as pawns or largely they become essentially a facet of the confrontation, if the relationship is not confrontational, or it's more stable, then it is more likely that that issue can be resolved.

The less the U.S. has done, the more dangerous the region has bec... by Vali Nasr

The less the U.S. has done, the more dangerous the region has become.

The Taliban may be trying to slacken the resolve of the military by suggesting that there could be a tremendous human costs to the military offensive and create public pressure on the military to back off from this offensive, but it may actually ricochet on them.