Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From MESH Admin
Walter Laqueur contributes a new paper to MESH’s Middle East Papers series, on Russia’s Muslim strategy. That strategy, barely coherent, is riddled with contradictions, as Russia vacillates between resentment of the American-led world order and fear of an ascendant Islam. For now, it’s the resentment against the West that dominates the Russian outlook, [...]

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From Mark N. Katz
After months of seemingly fruitless effort, the Obama administration suddenly appears to have made progress both on improving Russian-American relations and on resolving the Iranian nuclear issue. After the Obama administration announced that it would not implement the Bush administration’s plan to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic [...]

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From Mark N. Katz
Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s most recent statement that the Holocaust is a myth and denouncing Israel is an indication that he does not see U.S. President Obama’s call for dialogue and improved relations with Iran as desirable from his perspective.

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From Michael Reynolds
The other week over at ForeignPolicy.com, in a post titled “The ’safe haven’ myth,” Stephen M. Walt offered six reasons to be skeptical of the argument that a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan would pose a significant threat to the United States. On the same website, Peter Bergen rebutted Walt. Running through Walt’s six reasons one [...]

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From Mark N. Katz
At the recent Moscow summit, the U.S. and Russian governments made progress on strategic arms control and on Afghanistan. Instead of heralding broader Russian-American cooperation, however, the results of the Moscow summit—and subsequent G-8 summit in Italy—suggest that Russian-American cooperation is likely to remain limited, especially regarding the Middle East.
Presidents Obama and [...]

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From Robert O. Freedman
On the two major Middle East issues that divide Russia and the United States and that could have been talked about at the U.S.-Russian summit—Moscow’s legitimization of Hamas by regularly inviting its delegations to Moscow, and Russia’s protection of Iran from serious UN Security Council sanctions—not much appears to have been accomplished. [...]

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From Mark N. Katz
There has been an ongoing debate here at MESH and elsewhere about whether Israel can, will, or should launch an attack against Iran to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. One possible method by which such an attack might be degraded or even deterred is if Russia sells the advanced version of [...]

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