Middle East & North Africa

By and large, only immigrants can deliver true native language ability and deep cultural understanding. Those with such skills have been in high demand in recent decades. Many have left normal American lives to answer the call. They often have deployed to the world’s most dangerous war zones to serve as contractors alongside U.S. troops and intelligence officers. And a number of them have been killed or wounded.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s Egypt is a dangerous place for dissidents. Under Sisi’s command, the military and security forces used extraordinary violence to consolidate power in the summer of 2013 that cost at least 817 lives. Security forces detained, charged, or sentenced at least 41,000 people between July 2013 and April 2014, mostly because of their alleged association with the Muslim Brotherhood. The human rights situation deteriorated even further in subsequent years. Egyptian police forcibly disappeared citizens, leaving no legal trail. 

A failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday was mounted with explosive-armed drones, according to news reports. Nine days earlier, and on the other side of the world, terrorists claimed to have sent an armed drone to attack the international airport in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. No one was killed in either case, and the circumstances of both remain murky. But a new and dangerous era in non-state-sponsored terrorism clearly has begun, and no one is adequately prepared to counter it.

In this installment of “Conversations in Diplomacy," the Future of Diplomacy Project's Faculty Director Nicholas Burns is joined by Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, for a conversation on tackling global security challenges in the digital age and the changing nature of intelligence agencies.

Nicholas Burns says Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who met with Trump campaign, is 'no friend of the US' and calls Trump is 'weak on Russia.'

"...[A]s disconcerting as the overcrowding and financial strain are, they are not as troubling as the prospect of the prison system becoming a breeding ground for a new insurgency, as was the case with the U.S. prison system in Iraq. There, incarcerated insurgent leaders used their time to develop strategies and recruit new fighters for radical groups."

In August 2015, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published its first formal defense doctrine. Authored by IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, the doctrine outlines the military's strategic and operational responses to the main threats facing Israel. The doctrine was published only in Hebrew.

In order to make this document accessible to the American strategic community, the Belfer Center commissioned an English translation of the strategy. Users can easily navigate the seven sections of the translation – the introduction, five chapters, and conclusion. In addition, the Belfer Center annotated the translated document to provide context for readers less familiar with the Israeli national security environment.

"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."