Policy Analysis

The Yemeni group has mostly stayed on the sidelines so far, but Washington should not mistake restraint for passivity.

Despite President Trump’s transformative goals in the Middle East and the ongoing need for American help in weathering multiple regional crises, the new budget request doubles down on a range of problematic funding cuts.

The Trump administration won’t achieve all of its war goals, but it could still notch a strategic win with time.

Flipping the kill switch is a potent exercise of authoritarian control, but expediting countermeasures like D2C can help prevent regimes from using this tactic in the future.

Tehran is hoping that its Persian Gulf Strait Authority will establish “facts on the ground” and give it leverage at the negotiating table, so Washington and its partners need to respond right away with a suite of military, economic, and diplomatic countermeasures.

Washington should treat the recent public discontent not as a sign that Syria’s transition is failing, but as an opportunity to help ensure that Damascus does not repeat the mistakes of previous governments.

Although disarming the group is still crucial, negotiators need to realize that they will never really break Hezbollah’s hold on Lebanon so long as it retains Iranian support and key political allies and government posts in Beirut.

U.S. and Israeli experts discuss the potential obstacles to progress in upcoming rounds of negotiations, and explain why keeping the Lebanon track separate from the Iran talks would be wise.

Tehran seems just as enthusiastic about the new prime minister as Washington—a telling sign that the militia-dominated status quo in Baghdad will be difficult and slow to change, if it changes at all.

Washington’s message to Syrian officials should be simple: foreign energy capital is unlikely to flow quickly as long as the outside world sees their government as an opaque regime with unclear authority, factional infighting, uncertain legal protections, and unresolved military tensions with powerful neighbors.

Some may read Xi’s approach as a strategy to make America expend its strength far from Chinese shores, but Beijing increasingly looks more like a regional power than a global superpower.

Power parity informs the view from Ankara, which has a strong interest in preventing Iran from going nuclear or alternatively falling into chaos—even as the war’s outcome will be largely outside Turkish control.

The war has shown that Iran’s one-way attack drones are highly adaptable tools of coercion and military effect, able to continue imposing costs across the Gulf region and beyond even after heavy losses.

Tehran’s drone ecosystem has been hit hard, but not at its roots—with help from Russia and China, the regime could restore many of the program’s capabilities within months while steadily working toward more dangerous next-generation models.

The years that President Sharaa’s circle spent managing Idlib province now look less like improvised wartime governance and more like a deliberate long-term project to build the cadres of a future state.

For decades, Tehran has repeatedly exploited Western diplomatic urgency to extract concessions, buy time, and refill its coffers; the answer is to turn time itself against the increasingly vulnerable regime.

Cairo’s economic mismanagement has increased the country’s reliance on Gulf largesse, but that spigot may soon run dry for diplomatic and financial reasons.

In focusing on cartels and gangs in the Western Hemisphere as well as left-wing extremists, the administration's “radical shift” elides certain threats from the Middle East along with the political right, while appearing to write off diplomacy and capacity building as key tools.

The first gathering in a decade by the Palestinian Authority’s dominant party will cast light on a post-Abbas future and governance in Gaza, among other issues.

An agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting the U.S. blockade could make it easier to ultimately address more complex issues such as Iran’s uranium stockpile, missile program, and support for proxies.