Arab & Islamic Politics

Calculating the actual costs of reconstruction is important, but the most crucial question is whether the PA is truly ready to supplant Hamas and assume effective control over Gaza.

Washington should keep pressuring Baghdad to make early, ungrudging goodwill gestures toward the Kurds instead of reverting to hardball negotiations and broken promises.

As the P5+1 and Iran negotiate about the nuclear impasse, Iranian factional politics has heated up. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made disparaging comments about the nuclear negotiations, yet supported continuing the talks. The Rouhani government is facing a variety of criticisms: it is vigorously defending its record at

On August 10, Recep Tayyip Erdogan continued his prolific electoral run by collecting almost 52 percent of the vote in Turkey's presidential poll, easily besting his chief rival, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who represented the left-right CHP/MHP coalition. A large part of Erdogan's success lay in peeling away conservative MHP voters through

Today's draft agreement will have to withstand domestic and foreign pressure on Amman.

Lebanon is in grave danger of becoming the next ISIS victim, and recent clashes in Arsal were just a taste of things to come.

Much of the group's early military success was due to the weakness and unpreparedness of its enemies, so the right blend of countermeasures could still roll it back.

A coalition of like-minded Arab states -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates -- is emerging to confront militant Islamism.

It would be naive to think that economic growth will solve all of the Middle East's thorny dilemmas; but it would be equally naive to believe that they can be solved without it.