Syria

Constitution-Making in Libya: What Lessons From Tunisia?

By Geoffrey Weichselbaum and Duncan Pickard

The constitution adopted in Tunisia at the end of January represents the region’s best chance at achieving an elusive goal: sustainable democracy based on the rule of law. Next door, Libya two weeks ago elected a Constitutional Assembly to attempt the same.

Zooming in on Syria: Adapting US policy to local realities

By Faysal Itani & Nathaniel Rosenblatt

The key to ending the crisis in Syria is a better understanding of local players and power dynamics. By viewing the conflict through a local prism, the United States and its Western allies can help build a coherent, capable, and legitimate opposition, which is an essential ingredient for any political transition or even negotiations. In […]

Syria and Ukraine: Cause and Effect?

By Frederic C. Hof

In 1961, a young US president with an active, inquisitive, open, and skeptical mind learned the hard way that the world can be cruel; that behavior regarded in polite society as restrained, rational, and reasonable can be processed by the bullies of the world as weakness to be exploited.

What Ukraine Means For Syria

By Edward P. Joseph

As outrageous and unsettling as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is, the fact remains that the real killing continues to take place in another area of Russian interest: Syria. Indeed, more than a quarter of the 136,000 Syrians killed in the war have died over the past five months alone.

Adapting US Policy to Local Realities in Syria

As the conflict in Syria enters its fourth year, US policy has consistently failed to achieve its stated object: a negotiated political transition based on the mutual consent of the regime and opposition. The United States and its Western allies have focused on summits and high-level diplomacy as the most effective means to that laudable […]

Lebanon Stuck Between Leaky Borders and Politics

By Maya Gebeily

A twenty year-old girl and a ten-year old boy were killed by Syrian government airstrikes last week. It would sound like any other day in Syria, except these strikes took place on the Lebanese side of the border, killing two Lebanese civilians and wounding several others.

President Obama’s Foreign Policy is Based on Fantasy

By Editorial Board of the Washington Post

For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality.

Ukraine Crisis Tests Obama’s Foreign Policy Focus on Diplomacy Over Military Force

By Scott Wilson, Washington Post

Ukraine has emerged as a test of Obama’s argument that, far from weakening American power, he has enhanced it through smarter diplomacy, stronger alliances and a realism untainted by the ideology that guided his predecessor.

Syria: Time To Review the Bidding

By Frederic C. Hof

Well first of all, David, this is not a genocide. It’s a horrific civil war that has spilled over and infused the neighboring states. It’s one that we have worked very hard to end, through support to the opposition, through humanitarian assistance, through active and aggressive diplomacy. And David, we have every interest in trying […]

Would the Loss of Ukraine Harden Russia Policy on Syria?

By Barbara Slavin

Why do despots invariably have such atrocious taste?  Ukrainians wandering wide-eyed through the palace outside Kyiv of fugitive Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych simultaneously marveled and gagged at the gilded furniture, stuffed dead cats and gold bathroom fixtures. But their elation at overturning their corrupt, if elected, president could fade quickly if Russia’s elected, if authoritarian, president Vladimir […]