This brief on the Trump administration's approach to the battle against ISIS is the first of a three-part series on America's foreign policy in the Middle East. Subsequent reports will examine U.S. policy in Syria and the intensified competition between Iran and traditional U.S. partners in the region, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The list of 13 demands presented in June 2017 by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates suggests a supremely ambitious set of goals behind their embargo of Qatar, including “red lines” that touch directly upon Qatari sovereignty and that Doha will almost certainly reject. The stage is thus set for a contest of endurance, one that with every passing month looks more likely to result in favor of Qatar, writes fellow Gabriel Collins in this brief.
Days after Peru's Congress nearly impeached the country's president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, he pardoned his authoritarian predecessor, Alberto Fujimoro.
In his first prime-time address to the nation, President Trump committed the United States to a sustained and, indeed, enhanced military presence in Afghanistan.
On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein initiated what became one of the longest wars of the twentieth century — a war of attrition between Iran and Iraq that finally ended in August 1988. Fellow Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar examines the domestic causes of the Iran–Iraq War, delving into secret discussions among Iranian political and military elites during the conflict, their analyses of their own performance on the battlefield, and their revealing public disputes and blame game decades later.
This brief quantifies the potential exposure of key European countries to Russian gas price and supply manipulation, shows how Moscow has used energy as an instrument of coercive diplomacy since the early 1990s, and briefly assesses the impacts and future policy implications of Russian entities’ past use of the “energy weapon” in and near Europe.
Although it has not been widely successful to date in the former Soviet zone, Russia's use of the energy weapon against Western European countries in various forms still constitutes a strategic threat that warrants close attention from policymakers in Washington and throughout Europe, writes fellow Gabriel Collins.
The relationship between the United States and its Gulf allies has evolved in important ways since President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 declaration of American “vital interests” in the Persian Gulf — the “Carter Doctrine” — and while many circumstances have changed, the rationale for maintaining U.S. protection for Gulf oil supplies remains strong, authors Gabriel Collins and Jim Krane write in this paper.
The fall of Mosul and the ongoing demise of the ISIS pseudo-state are good news, but they do not herald either an end to the jihadist terrorist threat nor promise an enduring solution to the ongoing conflicts that have afflicted Iraq and, especially, Syria, writes Bonner Means Baker Fellow Joe Barnes in this post for the Baker Institute Blog.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appears to be a month away from destroying all remnants of what was once one of Latin America's most stable democracies.
