Diplomacy and International Politics

President Donald Trump, convinced that he alone can break stalemates with adversarial counterparts on trade and security, will put his theory to the test in Argentina this week. Global markets and foreign capitals are eyeing him anxiously.

"Since the United Nations Development Program began work on the Arab Human Development Reports (AHDR) in 2001, the situation in many Arab countries has gone from bad to worse. In fact, today the region cannot even come together to publish a new report. This is unfortunate, because finding a new shared vision for Arab people, especially Arab youth, is a prerequisite for ever achieving peace and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa."

The tensions unsettling the Saudi royal family became clear in September, when Joseph Westphal, the U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, flew to Jiddah to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, nominally the heir to the throne. But when he arrived, he was told that the deputy crown prince, a brash 30-year-old named Mohammed bin Salman, wanted to see him urgently. Senior Fellow, David Ignatius, discusses Mohammed bin Salman opportunity to transform Saudi Arabia.

We are into the season when you will be flooded with articles and analyses on the 100-year anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement that was signed on May 18, 1916. That agreement between Great Britain and France, with Russian acquiescence, defined how they would divide the spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the East Mediterranean region.

"Many analysts this week have marked the five years since the fall of former Tunisian President Zein el-Abideen Ben Ali, the first of several Arab dictators who were toppled from office by a wave of spontaneous street demonstrations across Arab countries. This process of retrospective introspection is important, if it can clarify whether new upheavals will occur or why the revolt of 2011 has been beaten back for many years..."

"Keep your eyes on the oil-fueled Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Arab states in the year ahead, because they are just starting to experience a genuinely novel, almost existential, challenge that will test the quality of their statehood and national integrity as these have never been tested before. The issue that sparks this historic reckoning of statehood and citizenship in the GCC is not Iran’s nuclear future, the fate of “Islamic State,” nor the wasteful war in Yemen. It is the sudden array of sharp fiscal adjustment measures that most GCC states have announced in the past three weeks..."

Excerpt from an October 16 installment of the “Inside the Middle East" Q&A Series, with Minister Hedi Larbi, Former Minister of Economic Infrastructure and Sustainable Development and Middle East Initiative Fall 2015 Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, on the role of International Monetary Institutions such as the World Bank and IMF in encouraging and implementing economic reforms during the political transition in Tunisia.

"When historians look back on the Middle East decades from now, they might find that trends in this region after 2015 were determined by the outcome of four seminal issues and battles that are in play this month."

Fears that events in Iraq will send global oil prices soaring have abated. Yet, the crisis has potentially huge implications for oil. Under any conceivable outcome to the current situation, oil production from Iraq will fail to meet recent expectations. The reason for this dire prognosis is that politics – not security or logistics – will be the biggest determinant of Iraq’s oil trajectory in the years ahead.

"While short-term pain is not unusual following the end of despotic regimes, long and protracted transitions can be terribly costly, requiring decades for societies to recover. Political impasse is not only depressing economies by discouraging trade and investment; it is also preventing the formation of governments that could implement much-needed economic and institutional reforms – and thus threatening to take these countries into a long downward spiral."