A new Belfer Center initiative seeks to research and analyze defense, security, and intelligence issues on the Arabian Peninsula. 

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has announced that Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, senior fellow with the Center and former long-time intelligence officer, will succeed Brigadier General (ret) Kevin Ryan as director of the Center’s Defense and Intelligence Project and the Project on Saudi and GCC Security at the end of April.

Paradoxically, the whole affair may have a silver lining if it provides an opening to devise some rules of the game that have been painfully missing from the cyber realm—an outcome possible only if we keep a realistic view of Russia’s perspective.

After the U.S. Presidential election, we are entering a particularly vulnerable period as militant Islamists seek to test the new American president just as al-Qaeda (AQ) tested President George W. Bush shortly after the 2000 election.

We are now 15 years into the fight against Islamic-inspired terrorism. The day after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US and its allies launched a global anti-terrorism coalition to crush AQ and its allies; a fight that many expected to last a generation. The timing was not wrong, but the nature of the threat itself was both misunderstood and underestimated.

As a life-long observer of Russia, I have never been as concerned as I am now on the state of Russian-American relations.

There has been much public criticism concerning European counterterrorism failings in the wake of the Paris and Brussels attacks. It has been widely reported in the media that the US intelligence community was well aware of clear deficiencies in this regard. In fact, after the Paris bombing, senior US officials publicly promised to provide the French with the same level of information that the US has been providing to the British for years. Such expressions of support raise a question: Why was the US not providing that level of information to the French before the Paris attacks?

It is well and good that the US and European counterterrorism partners intend to re-commit to two-way, broad information sharing on a near real time basis. For without robust information sharing as a foundation for cooperation, there is a strong possibility that threat-related information will not be passed until after the fact. The dangers of inadequate information are aggravated in the case of unprecedented attacks, because the “dots” or indicators of a plot that has never occurred would presumably be harder for analysts to identify and neutralize.

They say we are at war.

What does war look like?

Our enemy is violent Islamic extremism. He is Daesh. He is al-Qaeda. The enemy consists of all groups and adherents of violent Islamic extremism. Our enemy is the “global jihad” movement inspired by the 9/11 attack. They seek to impose an aberrant ideology on the world. For Daesh and their allies, coexistence with their enemies is unimaginable. Compromise is impossible. Daesh has adopted the mindset of an apocalyptic cult group.

With most commentary being focused on analyzing the technical requirement of the US and west’s agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program, it’s also crucial to take on early the broader ramifications of the deal on Middle East stability. These observations are framed by four quotations from an op-ed piece published by Henry Kissinger and George Schultz in the Wall Street Journal in April 2015.

I believe the wise statesmen’s advice can help guide the formulation of US strategic objectives that should be pursued following the nuclear deal with Iran. Kissinger and Schultz suggest four over-arching tasks to take on as first order of business in tying broader US policy initiatives into the agreement.

Based on an initial reading, I believe the framework for a nuclear agreement with Iran is worth trying to develop into a concrete deal, as long as the US-led coalition stays tough on terms, and recognizes that there are no verification measures that can guarantee that Iran won’t cheat. These negotiations are not about creating a legally binding document that replaces Iran’s existing obligations under the Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT), which remain binding. Thus, the details of compliance and measures of verification are notable, but they won’t prove to be decisive in ultimately assessing the merits of the agreement.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, writes in Just Security that the framework for a nuclear agreement with Iran is a positive step, and is worth pursuing to address the Iranian nuclear challenge. Specifically, he argues that military strikes do not have a strong chance of doing more than temporary damage to the nuclear program, and that the United States will not be able to keep the sanctions coalition together if American domestic politics scuttles the agreement. He concludes by noting that while we cannot eliminate risk of an Iranian breakout attempt, the deal is a better alternative to another war in the Middle East at this time.