Middle East & North Africa

NPR's All Thing Considered talked to Amanda Sloat, Fellow at the Belfer Center's Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, about Turkey's investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

An extensive survey of Syrian refugees in Turkey finds very few of them are en route to Europe. We speak to one of the researchers who conducted the poll about what made Syrians flee, and what they want from the peace process and the future.

What these modern-day Jacobins don’t realize, alas, is that destroying institutions is easier than building them. If their assault on our core political traditions and institutions is successful, the United States will at best end up weaker and poorer. At worst, it will cease to be a meaningful democracy. The fact that the generally conservative Economist Intelligence Unit recently downgraded America — that’s right, the "Land of the Free" — from a "full" to a "flawed" democracy tells you just how serious this problem is. Based on the early evidence, Trump and Bannon want to accelerate that trend.

"The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables..."

"What happens when, after another dozen major attacks, the chain of their barbarism outpaces the chain of our human solidarity? When is the permissible moment to start asking if we can muster as much wisdom and realism to fight terror as we do to harness emotions of solidarity? The recent increasing pace and widening geographic scope of terror suggest we are dealing with a qualitatively new kinds of terrorists — but the policy responses of governments and the emotional responses of entire societies suggest we have no idea how to respond to quell this monster."

Future of Diplomacy Project and Middle East Initiative Faculty Director R. Nicholas Burns spoke with Doug Gavel at Harvard Kennedy School about the Syrian refugee crisis and the recent House of Representatives' vote.

"Maybe there is something in the water in Vienna that makes people act like adults. Whatever it is, the meetings this week in Vienna on Thursday and Friday suggest that several significant and positive changes are taking place across several conflict zones and stress points in the Middle East. The Vienna gatherings are so interesting because they touch on half a dozen different ideological or military conflicts that take place at several different levels. They all converge in the Middle East, and their epicenter is Syria, which is burning out of control and scorching everyone around it."

"What happens when chronic violence and brutal aggression go unchecked for decades on end? We see an example of this in the release this week of the findings of a United Nations internal investigation of events during last summer’s war in Gaza. The report included the conclusion that Israeli attacks then killed 44 Palestinian civilians who had sheltered in seven United Nations schools. It also concluded that no weapons had been found inside those facilities, but rather in three other vacant UN-run schools that Hamas used to store arms, and from where it “probably” fired rockets at Israel."

"The more the Global War On Terror continues, the greater seems to be the expansion and impact of the very terror groups it seeks to defeat, with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra being the most recent examples. During the last few months that I have spent in the United States, I have wondered, with growing perplexity, why there is so little discussion here of why the GWOT seems only to have sparked the continued birth and expansion of international militant and terror groups across the Arab-African-Asian region."

"It is exasperating to listen to American officials pontificate about events in the Middle East and offer reasonable sounding proposals to resolve the area’s problems, when those same officials and the entire political power structure they represent refuse to acknowledge that they have played a major role in creating or expanding those problems. This is why it is astounding to watch the United States now lead the military assault against the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) by using the same techniques that contributed in a major way to the birth and growth of the militant Islamist ideology that forms the core of ISIS and its criminal deeds."