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Will the Saudi offensive work? If it does, it will re-entrench the Arab dictatorship model that thrived for so long in the region. That may or not be the model that someone like Mahmoud Abbas prefers, but it is now the only wagon to which he can hitch his hopes. Trump has created the opportunity to see if that tactic will work. If it does, hopes for democracy will have suffered a serious defeat. If it fails, the recent revival of Iranian regime change in US policy circles shows we are not learning from defeats and mistakes.Continue Reading

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Shocking though the revelation of Trump’s meeting may have been, it was not entirely surprising. For months, there have been reports of US intelligence officials warning their Israeli counterparts of Trump’s untrustworthiness. That, in and of itself, is remarkable. Career federal agents expressing to foreign colleagues that the president of the United States cannot be trusted should be unthinkable.

As with so much in the first four months of the Trump administration, however, the unthinkable has come to pass.Continue Reading

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In: Donald Trump, Turkey

The Trump administration’s silence in the face of Erdogan’s recent harsh criticism of Israel suggests that the two leaders have some desire to achieve positive outcomes at the upcoming meeting. Erdogan has expressed hope for a “new beginning” in relations with Washington, a clear reference to his dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies. But this will be a complicated undertaking. And complicated is not something Trump does well.Continue Reading

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In: Donald Trump, Syria

In the film The Lion in Winter, a young Anthony Hopkins, playing Richard the Lionheart, said “I never heard a corpse ask how it got so cold.” In the end, it is bloody, ongoing conflicts, not merely the use of certain weapons in them, that must be stopped or at least stemmed. International law and the United Nations charter provide ways to do that. It’s time we paid attention to fixing the politics that prevents them from doing so.Continue Reading