U.S. Policy

On March 16, Vice President Cheney departs on a Middle East trip that will take him to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank, and Turkey. Coming less than two months after President Bush's trip to the region, the vice president's itinerary is intriguing. His undisclosed agenda with "key partners,"

Fifteen years from now, when classified documents produced today begin to be declassified, we will surely look back with some discomfort and see just how far off some of our judgments were when written in 2008. Such is the nature of intelligence assessments. What would be worse, however, would be

The following is an excerpt of this article. Read the full text (PDF). When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a paper decrying the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy in March 2006, they received a torrent of criticism from former policymakers, historians, politically-inclined academics, and several

On February 9, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) passed two constitutional amendments legalizing a specific women's headscarf on college campuses. The Turkish turban -- not to be confused with the South Asian male turban -- first emerged in the country in the 1980s and has long represented an

The Politic is Yale University's journal of politics. The United States and its allies have made considerable progress in tackling terrorist financing since 9/11 -- one of the few areas of success in the global counterterrorism efforts. Serious challenges have emerged, however, which could threaten the record to date. As

On February 8, 2008, Martin Indyk and Harvey Sicherman addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Mr. Indyk, former ambassador to Israel and assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs during the Clinton administration, currently directs the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Mr

Since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, the absence of U.S. action toward the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) presence in northern Iraq has been driving a wedge between Turkey and the United States. Meanwhile, Turkey's ties with Iran and Syria, which analysts characterized as "cold if occasionally

The U.S. commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge (QME) -- that is, the technological, tactical, and other advantages that allow it to deter numerically superior adversaries -- is a longstanding tradition that every president since Lyndon Johnson has reiterated. Today, however, Israel's relations with Arab countries are more complicated

The confrontation this month in the Persian Gulf between Navy warships and small boats of Iran's Revolutionary Guard may have come as a surprise to the public at large, but not to me. I witnessed a very similar event five years ago during the invasion of Iraq. It was April