Soner Cagaptay reflects on what it might take to get Russia to back the Syrian opposition.

Zvika Krieger writes on The Atlantic about the debate on cutting U.S. aid to Egypt and what that might mean for Israel. Read more »

There is a Middle Eastern country that lately finds itself enmeshed in a large degree of controversy.  A non-Arab democracy founded by a cadre of westernizing secularists, it has committed a number of diplomatic missteps.  The country’s initial response to unrest in the Arab world was to back the ruling authoritarian leaders, which proved a mistake.  It also finds its relations with a critical neighbor and trading partner quickly and severely deteriorating in the wake of the Arab Spring, which is challenging for a number of reasons, not least of which that it relied on this neighbor to be its gateway to the Arab world. Read more »

For those of you who missed it, please find below an excerpt from my piece published in the New York Times Sunday Review yesterday, February 12, 2012. Read the full piece here. Read more »

Alexey Pilko writes on Eurasia Review about the dilemma of Syria.

Emad Mekay says, on the San Francisco Chronicle the U.S. shouldn’t support Egypt’s democracy backers. Read more »

Egypt’s former ambassador to the United States, Nabil Fahmy, once remarked that the U.S.-Egypt relationship was like “a mature marriage.”  It seems that with the trial of 19 Americans and 16 Egyptians and 8 others affiliated with the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the Egyptians are serving divorce papers.  The last four decades have had many highs and quite a  few lows, but now it is time to move on.  What was once a strategic relationship built on the firm geo-strategic foundations of containing Soviet influence in the Middle East, forging peace between Arabs and Israelis, and helping to ensure the stability of the region is now an unhealthy codependency with no strategic rationale or direction. Read more »

There has been a lot on twitter and elsewhere in the social media world about the awful soccer riot in Port Said on February 1^st and the subsequent violence in Cairo. The best analysis that I have seen thus far is James M. Dorsey’s piece in Foreign Policy, “Ultra Violence” which can be read here. Read more »

Shadi Hamid on The Atlantic makes a case for intervention in Syria.

Speaker of the newly-elected People’s Assembly in Egypt gives his first address to parliament. Read more »

This article was originally posted on ForeignAffairs.com on January 25th, 2012.

Ain Sukhna is stunningly beautiful. After a two-hour drive east from Cairo through the featureless desert, the road rolls toward the steel blue waters of the Gulf of Suez. Nestled beneath ocher-colored hills, the town is a string of industrial buildings, ramshackle half-built structures, and the weekend villas of Cairo’s well-heeled. This is where the falool — the former officials, businessmen, and intellectuals who, for almost three decades, rationalized for the Mubarak regime — fled when their leader fell. With its manicured lawns, pristine infinity pools, and towpaths to the beach, Ain Sukhna couldn’t be more different from the threadbare and creaking Egypt that former President Hosni Mubarak bequeathed to his people. Read more »

Adeel Malik and Bassem Awadallah comment on the economic challenges in a ‘post-Arab Spring’ Middle East.

Abdel Moneim Said argues that the American ruling on sharia in Oklahoma may hold a lesson for Egypt in drafting its constitution. Read more »

This article was originally published on The Atlantic on Tuesday, January 17, 2012.

The most stunning thing about how American foreign policy experts and elites talk about Syria today is the one aspect of the country’s crisis that they won’t discuss. There is little to no actual debate about direct international intervention into an uprising and crackdown that has cost more than 5,000 Syrian lives. In response to the Bashar al-Assad regime’s violence against largely peaceful protesters, which leaves dozens of people dead every day, the international community has denounced Damascus “in the strongest possible terms,” as diplomats like to say, placed the country and its leadership under sanction, and searched for additional punitive measures short of the use of force. Oddly, at the same time that the United States, Europe, and the Arab League have apparently rejected meeting Bashar al-Assad’s violence with violence, there is an assumption in Washington that it is only a matter of time before the Syrian regime falls. It is largely a self-serving hunch that does not necessarily conform to what is actually happening in Syria, but nevertheless provides cover for doing nothing to protect people who are at the mercy of a government intent on using brutality to re-establish its authority. After all, if the many Syrians who have been in open revolt since March of last year are on the verge of bringing down Assad, then, as the conventional wisdom has it, there is no need for a international response and thus no need for an agonizing debate about whether to use force in Syria. But this logic seems less convincing every day, and it might be time to reconsider our assumptions about intervention. Read more »