Coordinated suicide bombings on the Iranian embassy in Beirut yesterday poured fuel on concerns that the Islamic republic and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah were dragging Lebanon into the two-and-a-half-year Syrian conflict. Tehran sought to both blame Israel and threaten retaliation for the attack beyond Lebanon’s borders, but their case – per a late Tuesday...

With speculation over impending Iran talks reaching a fever pitch, analysts are outlining what minimum requirements an interim deal with Iran must meet if it is to successfully move Tehran further from being able to construct a nuclear weapon. At stake more precisely is whether Iranian concessions – to be...

Observers are issuing increasingly sharp warnings that instability in Yemen risks becoming endemic, nearly two years after the fall of Yemen’s then-dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. A transition sponsored and supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has been halting, and the country’s political situation is complicated by at last two...

Former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror spoke over the weekend to the Financial Times, days before global powers were set to meet with Iranian negotiators in efforts to strike a deal over Iran’s nuclear program. The P5+1 group has been criticized – including by France, which is part of the...

Recent days have witnessed something of a rhetorical campaign questioning the motivations and even loyalties of analysts and lawmakers pushing for new sanctions against Iran. Weeks ago the administration line – that sanctions had coerced Iranian leaders into coming to the negotiating table against their will and that new sanctions would derail ongoing...

The last few months have seen Israel seek to engage the United Nations in general, and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in particular, on the hope that active participation in the global body and its forums may alleviate what both Israeli and American diplomats have criticized as a...

Two weeks ago French objections to what the country’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius described as a “sucker’s deal” reportedly contributed to blocking a deal between the P5+1 and Iran that would have swapped limited Iranian concessions for relief from international sanctions. Last week Patrick Maisonnave, France’s ambassador to Israel, outlined the...

The U.S. has in the past few decades enjoyed enormous benefits from close military-to-military ties with Cairo. Among other advantages, U.S. forces received preferential overflight rights and preferential access to the Suez Canal, both critical to U.S. efforts to move assets throughout the region. More broadly, ties between the U.S. and Egypt...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday took to CNN to criticize what he described as an “extremely bad deal” with Iran that global powers are said to be hopeful they can secure this week in Geneva. It’s not just the terms of the trade – which would allow Iran...

Forces loyal to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime today intensified their bombardment of the mountain town of Qara, a strategically important crossing point between Lebanon and Syria used by opposition forces. The town also sits near the highway that connects Damascus to Syria’s largest city Aleppo, and the Syrian military’s advance on...