Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From MESH Admin A journalist has described President Obama’s approach to foreign policy as “applying the same tools to international diplomacy that he once used as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side.” In a new number of Middle East Papers, Mark N. Katz explains why these tools are likely to be ineffective in influencing […]

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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 […]

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From MESH Admin The New York Times has produced this interactive graphic about the no-longer-secret uranium enrichment facility at Qom in Iran. Click here if you cannot see it below. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/newsgraphics/2009/0928-slug/BasicStepper.swf” width=”550″ height=”475″ wmode=”transparent” /]

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From Raymond Tanter As the Obama administration prepares for October 1 negotiations with Iran, Tehran steals a page from Pyongyang’s playbook: escalate confrontation in advance of engagement. Why not? Escalation to win concessions and backtracking on promises have worked for North Korea. On September 27, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted war games that included […]

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From Alan Dowty In some respects, Ari Shavit’s widely-noted interview of Israel’s national security adviser, Uzi Arad, contained no great surprises. Arad’s insistence on “deep” acceptance of Israel (not just de facto acknowledgement of Israel’s existence) by Palestinians; leaving the door open, just by a crack, to a Palestinian state, while dismissing the possibility of […]

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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 […]

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From Stephen Peter Rosen The prospect of being hanged, we are told, wonderfully concentrates the mind, but on what? The prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon now concentrates our attention on the possibility of Israeli preventive military action or on American sanctions, both of which might prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. These are important […]

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