Not all that long ago, Barack Obama seemed to have big plans for the Middle East. Back in June of 2009, the president traveled to Egypt to unveil what he promised would be a “new beginning” between America and the Muslim world. In a major address at Cairo’s famed Al-Azhar University, he proposed a new, more harmonious U.S. approach toward a region that had been roiled by nearly a decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the recent national election in Ukraine is just how significant a reversal of fortune it represents for Russia.
Will the real Hassan Rouhani please stand up? Since his election last summer - and especially since the start of nuclear negotiations with the West last fall - Iran's new president has become a darling of the U.S. and European diplomatic set. The soft-spoken leader who now serves as Iran's political face is widely viewed as a "moderate" counterpoint to his firebrand predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as a guarantor of a much-sought-after nuclear deal with the West.
Tucked away in a busy corner of the Pentagon is a little-known bureau known as the Office of Net Assessment. Headed by Andrew W. Marshall, the legendary nonagenarian strategist who has advised every American president since Richard Nixon, it serves as the U.S. military's in-house think tank on a broad range of foreign policy and defense issues. Its specialty, however, is a very specific discipline: the study of the different ways in which the United States can identify and exploit emerging trends in an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.
Remember the U.S.-Turkish alliance? Not long ago, President Obama was proclaiming that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his favorite Middle Eastern statesman, and one of very few foreign leaders with whom he had forged a "bond of trust." Yet today, ties between Washington and Ankara are unmistakably on the downswing. The culprits are a quartet of issues that cumulatively have soured relations between Washington and Ankara — and which promise to keep the once-vibrant relationship at a low ebb, at least for the foreseeable future.