Charlotte Kennedy Anthony Bubalo recently lamented that alliances and enmities in the Middle East are becoming so complex that even long-term watchers are struggling to keep up. Well, if that’s the case, Pakistan just added to the layers of confusion. Last month, Pakistan surprisingly refused to join its long-time ally and benefactor …

Nikolas K. Gvosdev There have been two general reactions in the West to the first public glimpses of the T-14 Armata tank, the first completely post-Soviet Russian design for a main battle tank. The first is to view its claims—of greater speed, maneuverability, firepower and survivability vis-à-vis anything …

By Tom Nichols A few weeks ago, I directed Harvard Extension School’s “Crisis Game,” in which students had to play out a hypothetical Cold War crisis involving nuclear weapons. The realization that a crisis could escalate to nuclear war shocked younger students who had never given much thought …

Allyson Beach As a requisite resource, water and its infrastructure are decisive targets in the self-declared Islamic State’s (IS) strategy for regional expansion in the Middle East. Although IS has not demonstrated the capacity to operate technologically intensive water infrastructure, it continues to pursue control of dams and …

Why did Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates provide a pulpit for a firebrand cleric who calls for the destrcution of Shiites, Alawites, Christians, and Jews? Oren Adaki, David Weinberg  Foreign Policy As Saudi Arabia expands its involvement in wars across the Middle East, the kingdom has …

By Vasudevan Sridharan The Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council is set to hold major talks in the presence of French President Francois Hollande over the handling of the Yemen crisis. The Sunni-dominated Council of Gulf monarchs is expected to call for a partial humanitarian truce in Yemen, at least …

Shlomo Brom Shimon Stein When President Barack Obama told Prime Minister Netanyahu in his first telephone call after the Israeli elections that Washington would “reassess” its positions on U.S.-Israeli relations and Middle East diplomacy after the Israeli prime minister took a position against Palestinian statehood during his reelection …

Jeremy Friedman At its core, the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a bet on the future direction of the Iranian regime. Two former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, argued in a recent critical piece in the Wall Street Journal that the central claim of …

James Holmes Methinks the U.S. Navy has contracted some weird allergy to fleet experimentation. Why else would service potentates retire a promising experimental aircraft like the X-47B unmanned combat air system demonstrator, or UCAS-D, in its infancy? Experimentation, of course, is the process of testing some tactic, concept, …