Don’t Be Fooled by the Hamas-Fatah Union

The new Palestinian unity government of Fatah and Hamas puts the lie to fundamental assumptions on which the U.S. approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace have long rested, most prominently within the Obama administration. Washington has long assumed that a two-state solution is attainable, that “land for peace” is the formula for success, that the key remaining …

Red Line Redux

The future path of U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran, which have now reached a crucial stage, may be foreshadowed in the U.S. agreement with Syria to dismantle its chemical weapons program. Any U.S.-Iranian deal-making that follows the Syrian model, however, would prove nothing more than a pyrrhic victory, leaving the Middle East more dangerous and, …

Obama’s Retreat from the War on Terror

President Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy, which he unveiled last week in a high-profile speech at the National Defense University, is less off-base than incomplete, reflecting his effort to limit the scope of the problem and the requirements of the response in ways that will prove inadequate to the challenge. In nearly 7,000 words, Obama expressed ambivalence …

U.S. Must Rethink Egyptian Foreign Aid Strategy

As the world evolves, presenting new challenges to U.S. national security, the patterns of U.S. foreign aid should evolve with it. Nowhere is this truer than in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous and historically most influential state, which is gradually transforming itself from a Western-leaning secular autocracy into an increasingly Islamic state that’s run …