The resonance between Turkey’s political psychology and that of Iran, and the ways in which it manifests itself in foreign and security policy debates are testimony to how Shia jihadists like Soleimani and the Turkish Islamist adversaries he battled have succeeded in poisoning the policy thinking and rhetoric in what was, once upon a time, the leading Muslim-majority ally of the US and its transatlantic partners.
Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracis, where he focuses on Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria and the geopolitics of the Levant.
Trump is still unsure if he wants to leave Iraq. If he does, he’ll validate Soleimani’s strategy and breathe new life into his shadow armies. If he denies Iran that territory and holds the regime accountable for the actions of its proxies, he will have done something that no other president has done since the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1979. He’ll have changed the rules of the game.
As an homage on this fifth anniversary of his murder, Nisman deserves an unrelenting commitment to justice for his killers and for the victims of the AMIA bombings.
The time is ripe to dispense with the narrative that Trump is undermining NATO and the global democratic alliance. France and Germany, two international powerhouses, are the ones emboldening NATO’s enemies.