Middle East & North Africa

"One overlooked feature in this ongoing tragedy is that Trump isn't wrong about everything. Some of his critics won't admit it, but several of the themes he sounded during the 2016 campaign — such as the need to rebuild America's deteriorating infrastructure — were correct (if far from original), and some of his foreign-policy instincts were sound even if his command of details was not. A minimally competent president could have made substantial progress on most if not all of these fronts, thereby leaving the country better off and enhancing his prospects for a second term."

For a century, the geopolitics of energy has been synonymous with the
geopolitics of oil and gas. However, geopolitics and the global energy economy
are both changing. The international order predominant since the
end of World War II faces mounting challenges. At the same time, renewable
energy is growing rapidly. Nevertheless, the geopolitics of renewable
energy has received relatively little attention, especially when considering
the far-reaching consequences of a global shift to renewable energy.

The paper starts with a discussion of seven renewable energy scenarios
for the coming decades: the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2016, the EIA’s
International Energy Outlook 2016, IRENA’s REmap 2016, Bloomberg’s
New Energy Outlook 2016, BP’s Energy Outlook 2016, Exxon-Mobil’s Outlook
for Energy 2016 and the joint IEA and IRENA G20 de-carbonization
scenario.

"As I argued several years ago, the days when the United States could create security and maintain order in nearly every part of the world are behind it, and U.S. leaders must do a better job of deciding which places matter most and which can be left to run themselves. To a large extent, Obama never made that choice."

"The recent and ongoing spate of decisions by several Arab governments to dissolve and ban certain political groups (mostly Sunni or Shiite Islamists) is a reflection of two dynamics that need to be reviewed together: rising sectarian, political, and ideological tensions across the region, alongside continuing structural inabilities in every Arab country, except Tunisia to date, to accommodate a range of differing political views in a legitimate governance system..."

"Egyptian President Abdelfattah Sisi has suggested a regional diplomatic gathering to push ahead towards a permanent Arab-Israeli peace. But the proposed regional conference has not been formulated with widespread consultations among the key players or coordinated with other international initiatives on the table, and the positions of the principal Israeli and Palestinian parties remain too far apart to stir any hopes of success..."

An audio recording of a book talk by Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science, on his most recent book The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East.

"Five years after the Arab Spring uprisings began, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia have achieved reasonable levels of political stability. Yet economic growth remains tepid, and the International Monetary Fund does not expect the pace of expansion to exceed 1.5% per capita this year. Given the region’s large catch-up potential and young workforces, one must ask why this is so..."

"The role of foreign policy issues in the American presidential campaign is both serious and frivolous, and appears to be a cause for concern, given the many contentious and negative issues involved. Yet things may not be as they appear, and we probably should not be very worried about what we are hearing these days."

"The main problem is that foreign military actions tend to achieve exactly the opposite of the intended goals. Military assaults against terror groups, resistance movements, and just plain old civilian demonstrators or non-violent rebels — whether carried out by local governments or foreign powers, or both — tend to harden and expand the resolve of those who challenge the states in question..."

An audio recording of a public talk by Rami Khouri, MEI Non-Resident Senior Fellow; Senior Fellow, Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy, American University of Beirut; Syndicated Columnist.