Policy Analysis

Thirty years after Rabin’s assassination, Israel is ignoring the crucial Palestinian lessons handed down by its most intellectually honest statesman.

While Sudani leverages his position as prime minister to pursue another term, Iran and its militia proxies increasingly favor a weaker leader who won’t challenge their influence.

While the “GenZ 212” movement emerged from protests over maternal deaths and government neglect, it has evolved into a decentralized, quickly mobilizable digital network that continues to highlight Morocco’s governance problems.

A powerful new documentary on Henry Kissinger would have benefited much from a deeper assessment of how his overarching foreign policy strategy affected generation-spanning conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere.

With Hamas already regrouping, U.S. officials must help craft targeted language that empowers the Board of Peace to oversee a technocratic administration and stabilization force, with the goal of quickly filling the territory’s governance and security vacuum.

Given South Korea’s willingness to offer technology transfer, local production arrangements, and politically flexible partnerships, it has become an attractive alternative to Western and Russian suppliers, presenting both opportunities and competitive challenges for U.S. policy in the region.

Urgent U.S. action is needed to ensure that Hamas and its adherents do not find a backdoor into the various bodies that will govern the Strip, while simultaneously addressing the genuine dilemmas confronting leaders in Cairo and other Arab capitals.

Beijing’s latest policy initiative is vague, but this same quality could yield diplomatic clout and unite countries whose interests may otherwise diverge from China’s.

As phase two of the ceasefire nears, the PA remains the only viable organization that can replace Hamas in governing Gaza.

How can the international community avoid making the same mistakes it did after the revolution, when perceptions that the country’s democratic transition was secure led to economic complacency?

Pursuing even incremental steps will be difficult in a country long dominated by Iran’s chief regional proxy, but the two countries’ leaders have cracked the door open for future diplomacy.

There will be no peace, sovereignty, or reconstruction for postwar Lebanon until more of the group’s weapons are confiscated, but Beirut appears increasingly unwilling to tackle that task outside the southern frontier zone.

Damascus has already taken steps toward this end, but intensive international economic assistance and political mediation will still be vital—the latter drawing on relevant elements from Iraq’s governing model.

The Trump administration has been alluding to a potential breakthrough between the two regional rivals, but striking near-term deals on issues like Western Sahara and MINURSO would only be the first step in a necessarily long-term U.S. diplomatic effort.

Some of the administration’s counterterrorism actions have diverged from the strategy outlined during the president’s first term and from longstanding U.S. policy, raising important questions that should be addressed in the near future by a second-term CT document.

Without further diversification of suppliers, expanded renewable capacity, strategic investments in LNG, and nuclear partnerships beyond Russia, Turkey risks exchanging one form of energy dependency for another.

The director of the Institute’s counterterrorism program testifies on how the group’s postwar funding crunch will likely spur it to double down on raising money via its extensive criminal networks in the West.

By investing in relationships with scientists in the region, Beijing is seeking to fortify its own BeiDou system and drive growth, offering potential lessons for Washington.

By enticing Damascus with “no strings attached” deals, Moscow is once again trying to use Syria as a long-term strategic cudgel against U.S. interests, making it all the more urgent for Western governments to make fuller use of their current economic leverage.

The silver lining to the Doha attack may be the newfound “Gulf 3” alignment between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, whose wealth, diplomatic clout, and good relations with the Trump administration uniquely position them to help on a wide range of pressing regional issues.