
‘Ambassador Samantha Power Lied to My Face About Syria,’ by Kassem Eid
A letter from a survivor of Assad’s chemical attacks about his encounter with Obama’s chief diplomat at the United Nations

Rex Tillerson Babbles in Beirut While Middle East War Looms
Trump’s envoy tries to make a distinction between Hezbollah and Lebanon’s government where there is none

The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away
Regime clerics steal everything, including the pistachio nuts

Did President Obama Read the ‘Steele Dossier’ in the White House Last August?
News of the News: Why the timeline of the scandalous report that fuels Russiagate matters

Trump, Jerusalem, and the Jews
Was it cheap politics or historical concern and fellow-feeling that motivated the president to declare his allegiance to the millennial capital?

The Beirut Echo Chamber
News of the News: How Lebanon came to host an information campaign designed to protect the pro-Iran policies of the Obama administration from the pro-Saudi policies of the Trump administration

The Kurds, Trump, and the Decline of American Power
Why the United States’ inexplicable abandonment of the Kurdish people is ‘the geopolitical equivalent of a stock-market crash’

Soviet Ghosts Vacation in Santiago
An émigré travels in Chile with his wife and daughters

The United States Serves Up Kurdistan to Iran on a Silver Platter
‘We should not have abandoned Kurdistan, the only real pole of stability in the region’

John Kerry Was Right About Terrorism in 2004, and Donald Trump And His Generals Are Wrong
‘Afghanistan is the swamp and Trump now owns it’

Democratic and Republican Elites Are Using Trump to Whitewash 16 Years of Foreign-Policy Disasters
Successive two-term administrations made a mess of the Middle East. Who will clean up?

Putin Uses a Wave of Cyber-Attacks and a Political Assassination in Ukraine to Send a Message to the West
Military intelligence officer killed by car bomb in Kiev

The ‘Trump Dossier,’ or How Russia Helped America Break Itself
Getting Trump elected was not Putin’s goal. The Kremlin just wanted to sow discord and delegitimize the United States’ democratic institutions. Mission accomplished?

Trump’s Middle East Trip Was a Big, Surprising Success—and the Iranian Regime is Nervous
How the president’s photo-op diplomacy plays in Riyadh, Tehran, Beirut, Jerusalem, and back home in Trumpland

Bibi Should Tell Trump to Go Take a Selfie
When the American president visits the Western Wall next week as part of his Abrahamic monotheism heritage tour, he’ll be using the Jewish state as a prop—in a fantasy of Middle East peace, starring himself.

Free Iran’s Mandela, Ayatollah Boroujerdi
The prominent cleric spent 11 years in prison for preaching religious tolerance, equality, and non-violence inside the repressive theocracy

Mahmoud Abbas Is History’s Most Stubborn Real Estate Holdout
And Donald Trump knows ‘The Art of the Deal.’ Who will blink first?

Why Everything You Think You Know About Foreign Policy Is Wrong
How Gladwellian Internet ‘hot takes’ fueled the new echo-chamber press that enabled Obama’s foreign policy—and still rules Washington

Obama’s Ghosts
An accounting of the Democrats’ legacy in the Middle East, and where they can go from here

Steve Bannon’s Mentor, 91-year-old French Author Jean Raspail
A visit with the former Boy Scout and writer of ‘The Camp of the Saints’—and other fantasies of White domination of Western Civilization, which inspire Donald Trump’s adviser

Are the Neocons Still Republicans?
The foreign policy establishment that led us into Iraq finds itself in its own Never Trump desert

Will Obama’s Foreign Policy Wizards Save Trump?
The new president’s approach to Iran, Syria, and Israel looks a lot like the old president’s—because the same people are implementing it

Syria and the Failure of the Multicultural American Left
Six Years of Syrian Civil War: Why Assad is the Franco of the Middle East, and why the United States has done so little to help his victims—80 years after liberal-minded Americans took up arms in the Spanish Civil War

An Open Letter to Robert Kraft
From a lifelong New England Patriots fan who wonders about your friendship with President Donald Trump

Shall We Wake the Prime Minister, Habibi?
American politicians love to talk about ‘3 a.m. phone calls,’ but Israeli leaders actually receive them

Pro-Israel Hoaxer Hits DC
Did an anti-Zionist filmmaker from Oxford masquerade as his political opposite to get internships at lobbying outfits?

What Obama Owes Putin—and Why Donald Trump Is Left Holding the Bag
Broader aims on Middle East realignment led the outgoing president’s efforts at two-track diplomacy. One track was misdirection. The other handed the region to Russia and Iran.
