As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.
Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.
The first of these verities is that the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power. But neither is any ...
PRINCETON – Those who lead Israel’s defense establishment often come to consider peace with the Palestinians a necessary condition for the country’s security. Being tasked with maintaining the territories Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967 evidently causes the military and security brass to support political measures that would end the occupation. And yet the government shows no interest in pursuing a permanent settlement.
To appreciate this divide, consider the late Meir Dagan, who served as Major General of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and then as Direc...
In a region full of upheaval and bloodshed, Tunisia, with its relatively peaceful transition, progressive constitution, inclusive politics, and free and fair elections, has stood as a lone shining example. Five years after igniting the Arab Awakening and inspiring the world, the bloom has come off the Jasmine Revolution. A combination of internal headwinds and regional whirlwinds are extinguishing Tunisian hopes for a consolidated new social contract. “Each of us here is a time bomb,” warned one protest organizer in the town of Kasserine.
With each passing day, disillusion...
TEL AVIV – The late American diplomat George Ball once argued that Israel needed to be saved from its own suicidal policies “in spite of herself.” In a 1977
Foreign Affairs article, he called for an even-handed push by the United States for an Arab- Israeli peace. But, while Ball’s realistic position on the Israel-Palestine conflict is not uncommon among US State Department officials, it has remained off-limits for America’s political establishment, which has long upheld an almost sacred consensus on Israel – until now.
To be sure, to some ...
It seems there is no line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t cross to defend settlements. Israeli law says settlers can’t steal Israeli-recognized Palestinian private land for their own purposes? Netanyahu leaves no principle of rule of law unchallenged in the effor to "legalize" the settlers’ actions. The boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) movement challenges Israel’s legitimacy? Netanyahu jumps on the chance to exploit the BDS threat to legitimize settlements, accusing anyone who differentiates between Israel and settlements of embracing BD...
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to harp on the absurdities of how American politics relate to Israel. It is the satirical material of popular political shows, such as “The West Wing,” in which fictional President Josiah Bartlet once considered framing and mounting a map of the Holy Land from 1709 and got dressed down by staffers: “People would be offended – the map does not recognize Israel.”
In the current election, reality makes fictional scriptwriters seem unimaginative: drafting the Democratic platform became a Basil Fawlty-like exercise in not mentioni...
The greetings President Obama extended last week to Israel’s new government may have sounded conciliatory, but Mr. Obama no longer entertains any illusions about Israel’s leaders.
In the wake of last month’s election, the longtime peace activists and diplomats who have devoted much of their professional lives to achieving a two- state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more depressed and demoralized than ever before.
Well before Mr. Netanyahu declared during the recent election campaign that Palestinians would remain under Israeli military occu...
