Last week saw heightened tension in international policy deliberation over Iran. A foiled Iranian bomb plot in Paris, new revelations of a secret Iranian nuclear facility, and anxiety over imminent U…

Illustraion by: Ali Almandalawi Iasias Afwerki was born in 1946 in Asmara, which was, at the time, under British administration. In 1962 it was annexed by Ethiopia. Afwerki studied…

The international sanctions imposed on Syria since April 2011 are the most comprehensive on record. Nonetheless, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has over the past seven years waged an…

When U.S. President Donald Trump spoke to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, he deliberately signaled a definitive break with the internationalist consensus that has guided U.S. grand…

Early last week, Russia concluded Vostok-2018, its largest military exercise since the fall of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just their size, however, that made the recent war games so groundbreaking…

Russia has made itself the arbiter of events in Syria. Its military intervention and use of intensive bombing allowed it to change the balance of forces on the ground and save the Assad regime. But…

This article was originally published in Majalla in August, 2016. Over the summer, Majalla has been in contact with a figure we will refer to as Abu Ayyub al-Iraqi, though this is not his real…

Alistair Burt was appointed Minister of State for the Middle East at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Minister of State at the Department for International Development on 13 June…

Post-Truth GermanyAnd if it never happened? Then, of course, nobody is to blame. There is no responsibility, and there are no consequences. The end of a common understanding of what happened is in…

Using funerals for political purposes has a long, but not distinguished, tradition. In 44 B.C. eulogist Mark Antony claimed to Roman mourners that he came to bury Caesar. But his speech created a…