Analysis & Opinions

For over a decade, American officials have been touting the wisdom of a strategic “pivot” away from the Middle East in order to face the threat of a rising China. During that same period, Beijing has identified the Middle East as a primary arena for great power competition with the United States. 

Belfer Center experts on the U.S.-China relationship and Middle East issues shared thoughts on the significance of the unexpected Iran-Saudi Arabia agreement brokered by China. 

In 1999, the military was quick to respond to disaster. In 2023, Erdogan’s reforms left it hobbled and unprepared.

Following the UAE, and Bahrain, and one month before Sudan, Morocco became the third country in the MENA region to normalize ties with Israel in 2020. In exchange for resuming ties with Tel Aviv, Rabat benefited from important security and financial deals with the United States and ensured the recognition of the kingdom’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. This paper explores the domestic, regional, and international politics that determined the kingdom’s approach and assesses how the kingdom has navigated competing pressures.

In response to the global pandemic, public authorities in Egypt responded with a comprehensive package aimed at tackling the health emergency and supporting economic activity. This column examines how private sector firms perceived ease of access to finance before and after the emergence of Covid-19 in 2020.

Ten years after the onset of the Arab Spring, the Middle East and North Africa are torn between two visions of progress: a democratic one that seeks to replace the leaders who dominate the region, and an ostensibly modernizing one that seeks to replace the people who inhabit it. Though the latter project is currently ascendant, it is likely to founder on its own internal contradictions. Arab publics may be ambivalent about democracy, but the region retains considerable democratic potential.

Lebanon is facing its gravest economic and political crisis since the end of civil war in 1990 — and the situation was already dire before the pandemic hit. In early March, the country defaulted on $1.2 billion in foreign debt, the resulting free-fall of the Lebanese lira adding to a deep financial crisis.

Any financial aid to Lebanon should be tied to a material commitment by its elites to undertake long-needed reforms.

All is not lost, however. To restore full agency in our quest for freedom and dignity, it is time for the Palestinian leadership to absolve itself of an earlier declaration. The PLO must with haste rethink its 1988 peace initiative —specifically, the willingness to accept a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine, under a so-called “two state solution.”