Six years after the fall of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya remains mired in conflict and political chaos. Devoid of any central authority or national security structure, the Libyan state now exists only in name. It is time for a new approach – one that the United States should actively support.
To be sure, Libya does have an internationally recognized government: the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), born of the December 2015 Libyan Political Agreement, signed in Skhirat, Morocco, under the auspices of the United Nations. But not only did that government recei...
On the surface, much of President Trump’s foreign policy seems to be reverting to the mainstream upon first contact with reality. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s horrific use of chemical weapons produced a quick military response, applauded across partisan lines in Washington. Relations with Russia have settled to predictably adversarial depths. The administration is full of appropriately reassuring words about NATO, and the one-China policy was safely back in place for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Senior national security appointments have been mostly traditionalis...
US President Donald Trump has put on the back burner an executive order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. He should leave it there permanently. Inclusive governments that are seen to represent the overwhelmingly devout Muslim societies of the Arab world are a vital antidote to global jihadism.
To be sure, the Muslim Brotherhood has not always fully embodied democratic values. In Egypt, for example, President Mohamed Morsi’s government treated democracy as a winner-take-all proposition – and was ousted after little more than a year.
But addressi...
The Ultimate DealHenry Siegman
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London Review of Books
| March 24th 2017
Reactions by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to be his abandonment of America’s long-standing bipartisan support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. ‘I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like,’ he said. ‘I can live with either one.’ Given his ignorance of international affairs in general and the Middle East in particular, he probably had no idea of t...
Standing alongside the Israeli prime minister at a White House press conference on February 15, President Trump uttered an unusual and even groundbreaking comment on the Israeli-Palestinian future: “I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. . . . I can live with either one . . . if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy.” Most commentators and experts were quick to dismiss the specific formulation used by the president as rookie inexperience, an unfamiliarity with the conflict’s specific li...
Illiberal Israel
The Strategist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
| February 10th 2017
After a half-century of occupying Palestinian territory, Israel is succumbing to its deepest ethno-centrist impulses, and increasingly rejecting recognized boundaries. Israel is now on its way to join the growing club of illiberal democracies, and it has Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to thank.
Over the course of 11 years as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu has reshaped the country’s collective psyche. He has elevated the isolated, traumatized ‘Jew’—still at odds with the ‘gentiles,’ not to mention the ‘Arabs’—above the secula...
