Middle East & North Africa

In the Henty Mance interview, Joseph Nye, who coined term 'soft power,' says that the turmoil facing the United States and Harvard was worse in the 1960s.

Recap of MEI event "Afghanistan and Its Consequences."

The Russian/Chinese-led bloc is expected to approve Iran's accession this week amid uncertainty over President Raisi's foreign posture and ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan.

Nathaniel L. Moir writes of historical cases in which a U.S. tendency to over-rely on military capabilities and American economic strength proved unwise and how such power eventually proved to be irrelevant. In addition to the Vietnam War as an example, the rapid collapse of the Republic of China and its large military forces in late 1948 and 1949 offers some parallels with the collapse of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan Government, despite the United States investment of trillions of U.S. dollars.

Jacqueline Hazelton writes that regimes battling a counterinsurgency often depend on corruption to stay in power.

Winning hearts and minds doesn't defeat insurgent groups, author Jacqueline Hazelton argues. So why does the United States still rely on counterinsurgency?

As the United States emerges from the era of so-called forever wars, it should abandon the regime change business for good. Then, Washington must understand why it failed, writes Stephen Walt.

Reforming the Authorization for Use of Military Force isn’t as altruistic as it seems. Stephen Waly elaborates on three reasons why President Joe Biden would find this beneficial.

The United States' present dysfunction—and the hyper-securitized physical apparatus in Washington—is the natural outgrowth of its reckless, militaristic conduct abroad, Stephen M. Walt writes.

Ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa are torn between two visions of progress: a democratic one that seeks to replace the leaders who dominate the region, and an ostensibly modernizing one that seeks to replace the people who inhabit it. Though the latter project is currently ascendant, it is likely to founder on its own internal contradictions. Arab publics may be ambivalent about democracy, but the region retains considerable democratic potential.