Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Peter W. Rodman
The idea of splitting Syria from Iran seems like a no-brainer. This is the most important strategic argument that is often made for trying to improve the U.S. relationship with Syria. The idea has been around for a long time, however—25 years or so, in fact, since the Syrian-Iranian alliance took shape [...]

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From Chuck Freilich
Is it too late to dissuade Iran from developing nukes? A nuclear Iran does increasingly loom as the likely outcome, not because it is too late, but due to lack of sufficient resolve. Iran is at least two and probably more years away from an operational capability. France has taken a firm position [...]

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From Jacqueline Newmyer and Stephen Peter Rosen
The extension of American nuclear guarantees in the Middle East has been posed as a question of American guarantees to Israel. This is understandable given the intense hostility to Israel expressed by the Iranian regime. However, there is a broader objective that may be served by U.S. nuclear guarantees [...]

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MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Steve A. Yetiv is a professor of political science at Old Dominion University. His new book is The Absence of Grand Strategy: The United States in the Persian [...]

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From Alan Dowty
So the focus shifts to deterrence. Both Charles Krauthammer (here) and Zev Chafets (here) hold out little hope for international efforts to block Iran getting the bomb, or for military action to that end (though Chafets suggests that Israel might be able “in the best case” to weaken and delay Iran’s program). [...]

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From MESH Admin
The Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School, has just published a new study, Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. The image below is the resulting map of the Iranian blogosphere (click on the image for a larger view). From [...]

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From Daniel Byman
U.S. and world attention is focused understandably on the Iranian nuclear program. The list of reasons to worry about an Iranian bomb is exceptionally long and, for the most part, legitimate.

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