China’s Influence in the Middle East and the Strategic Considerations Underlying it
The difficulty in comparing America’s and China’s influence in the Middle East is that the two operate on entirely different planes. [Note: The Chinese use the term Western Asia, rather than the Middle East, to refer to a region that includes the Levant, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey and Iran.] Despite China’s impressive naval construction program, China […]
Four Decades of Talks with Arab Diplomats
Three months after I came to live in Jerusalem, in November 1977, I joined my fellow Israelis standing on the side of the road to welcome President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. I had decided to immigrate to Israel from Britain in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Four years later, watching the […]
The United States, Iran, and the Lessons of the Last War
Generals, the old adage goes, are prone to fighting the last war. Political leaders and the people they represent typically prefer to avoid armed conflict. They have heeded what they have believed to be the lessons of the most recent conflict in which they have been engaged, seeking, in effect, to avoid the last war. […]
Lessons We Should Have Learned from Vietnam
With recent experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, three former US ambassadors look back at their earlier careers as infantry officers in Vietnam and offer the following lessons.
When Nation Building Works
Nation building is a US policy for transforming post-conflict countries, a policy discredited among a broad swath of Washington because of Iraq and Afghanistan. But I question this consensus and recommend rehabilitating the policy in time to help reconstruct postwar Ukraine. >> Diplomatic Dispatches: Read more from Robert Silverman Didn’t the US role in postwar Japan […]
