Behind the scenes of U.S. midterm races, another campaign is quietly taking shape. Congress is poised to vote on the Trump administration’s proposed nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, with...
Tehran’s jihadi threat has only been growing since
As Baghdad devalues the dinar and Gulf governments confront mounting fiscal pressures, the Middle East faces a reckoning over oil dependence, Iranian proxy warfare, and the economic cost of perpetual conflict.
After nearly three years of staying out of the wars in the Middle East, Egypt may finally be ready to engage. On October 18, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pledged to provide Saudi Arabia with...
Riyadh has lived with the Houthi danger lurking at its southern border without good options to remove it.
Washington and Riyadh risk sacrificing Syrian stability by pressuring Damascus to join their war.
Battlefield dynamics in Yemen shift quickly, but Houthi aims do not. A movement organized around radical ideology and perpetual conflict now shares a border with a state organized around modernization...
Iraq is at a new crossroads. On October 8 and 12, Iranian drones targeted Kurdish Iranian opposition groups based in northern Iraq. These are just several of more than 1,000 attacks by Iran on Iraq over...
The death toll from the Houthis’ weekend attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport has risen to over 15, including one American — and Iran’s Yemeni partner shows no signs of stopping...
Syria sharpened its criticism of Israeli military operations in Syria during the first week of October, including the construction of a new fortified security line in southern Syria, east of the Israeli-occupied...
Less than two months after its signing, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia activated the Mecca Pact for the first time. On October 5, during an emergency meeting held in Riyadh, the three countries...
Israel’s formidable military and intelligence machines chewed up and spit out two of Iran’s most powerful regional proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. Tehran’s militias in Iraq have proved far less capable...
The Iran-backed Houthis march down Yemen’s west coast looked easy, but holding the territory is proving more difficult. Yemen’s internationally recognized government began Operation “Dawn of Yemen”—...
Yemeni President Rashad al Alimi, head of the country’s Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), announced Operation “Dawn of Yemen,” a counteroffensive against the Houthis, on October 4. Alimi said...
The ongoing war with Iran is driving countries in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean to invest in new security alliances. This is partly driven by the drubbing Gulf Arab states have taken from...
If these excuses hold in the pact’s first crisis, they will hold in the next.
The Houthis and the Yemeni Armed Forces, along with allied militias, have continued fighting on multiple fronts across the country, with the Houthis particularly focused on taking higher ground beyond...
Riyadh must clarify whether it seeks de-escalation or a decisive military response—and if the latter, what kind.
What happened to not negotiating with terrorists? American officials met with a Houthi delegation in Oman in the days after the Iran-backed group’s advance on Yemen’s west coast, which...