When Spring Turned to Winter in the Middle East

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman’s book about Arab political self-determination and self-destruction is called The Arab Winter: A Tragedy. And he really means it. Grief emanates from every line of this reevaluation of the Arab Spring, which revisits the hope followed by disaster in Egypt and Syria; the utopian Islamism that produced the hellish dystopia of ISIS; and, perhaps most painful, the success in Tunisia that showed the other tragedies were not inevitable. 

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Since Withdrawing from the Iranian Nuclear Deal, Has Trump Seen Any Results?

But it’s hard to substantiate Pompeo’s claim that Americans are now safer or that the Middle East is more peaceful, and recent events in the region offer facts that argue otherwise. In the two years since the U.S. dropped out of the deal, tensions in the Persian Gulf had reached a boiling point, freedom of passage in the crucial Gulf waters has been jeopardized, fighting spread to Saudi Arabia and endangered critical oil infrastructure, and U.S. and Iran came to the brink of a full out war after the killing of Qasem Soleimani and the retaliatory Iranian attack on an American base in Iraq.

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Book Review | Unasked Questions About Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince

MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman By Ben Hubbard Tim Duggan Books 384 pp., $28 Where does one begin? Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and likely its next king, emerged almost out of nowhere.  His father, Salman, the current king, was not expected to be the monarch, but two older full brothers predeceased him, so Salman became crown prince in 2012. When his half-brother King Abdullah died in 2015, Salman, then aged 79, succeeded to the throne despite concern about his mental faculties. Discarding two crown princes en route, Salman finally designated his son Mohammed, widely known as MBS, as his successor in 2017 and has allowed him almost free rein, or “reign,” ever since. So MBS, who had served as minister of defense from January 2015 and deputy crown prince from April...

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