The Saudis don't try to impose their will on the neighborhood but instead try to persuade the others to follow. Even last year's GCC intervention in Bahrain was at the invitation...
Last month, Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The visit was yet another example of the degree to which relations between the t...
The U.S. intelligence community has won plaudits for helping derail a series of recent terror plots, including this week’s disclosure of an al-Qaida affiliate’s attempt to use ...
The political leadership in Saudi Arabia was stunned by the "Arab spring" events and initially panicked. The rapid toppling of Tunisia's president and then Egypt's in populi...
A squat and priggish man of 46, Abdul Lateef Al Kindi has a thick salt-and-pepper beard and a reputation for causing controversy. During a sermon last August at his mosque in Srin...
Bahrain is an important nation because it is a focal point of what is happening in the Middle East today - the battle to find a balance between preserving the best values of the ...
The protests outside Saudi Arabian embassies in Egypt in recent days risk setting a dangerous precedent in relations between the two countries that would be to Egypt’s detrim...
Egypt's national tragedy took a turn towards farce April 27, when Saudi Arabia closed its embassy and several consulat...
When the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid led to an avalanche of protests in Tunisia in January 2011, nearly the entire Arab world began to rock with popular upri...
An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region f...
Saudi Defense Minister, Prince Salman, was the guest last week of his American counterpart Leon Panetta and, in an unusual step, was also hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. On ...
The Saudis and their neighboring Sunni Arab rulers along the Gulf littoral are now responding to what they see as the challenge of Iran as much as to last year’s events in ...
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are being pushed closer together by Iran's nuclear ambitions and the Arab Spring - creating new challenges for India....
The conventional wisdom has it wrong: Iran's development of a nuclear weapon won't spur its neighbors to get the bomb....
People are often confused about the overall extent of U.S. oil reserves. Some claim that the U.S. has hundreds of billions or even trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be produce...
While Syria's army cruelly and stupidly shells its own people and storms its cities, the so-called "axis of resistance" stretching from Tehran to Damascus is falling apart. Said ...
The Saudi royal family prizes stability as much as the oil that secures its wealth, but political upheaval across the Middle East has shaken the kingdom's sense of balance, f...
Saudi Arabia is acting on high oil prices....
What ails the Middle East today truly is a toxic mix of tribalism, Shiite-Sunni sectarianism, fundamentalism and oil - oil that constantly tempts us to intervene or to prop up di...
In recent years the king of Saudi Arabia has won plaudits around the world for promoting interfaith dialogs. Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top relig...
Those Saudis expecting the Arab Spring to bloom in their country were no doubt disappointed. Using its classic strategies-anti-Shia religious rhetoric, a powerful and Western-tra...
Qatar is more and more assuming the role vacated by Egypt in trying to settle local and international disputes....
The controversial deals make the EU the world's biggest exporter of weapons to the country....
Global oil markets and global commerce mean that American presidents will simply not be able to set this region off to the side....
People may get hung up on the fact that large numbers of Americans were killed on 9/11 but the prevailing attitude in Washington is that that matters less than geopolitical orien...
From Monday no one will be tortured in Syria. The state will guarantee personal freedom for its citizens and preserve their dignity and security. People's homes will be inviolabl...
A face-saving exit plan might be the only way to remove Assad, and prevent further polarisation of the world's superpowers....
The longer Obama waits and the deeper the humanitarian crisis worsens, the more likely it becomes that other actors will tip the balance in Syria. Using history as a guide, none wo...
The question of whether a war will break out over Iran's nuclear programme has been around for so long that is easy to become almost blase....
Keep your eye on Hamza Kashgari. He’s the 23-year-old former columnist for Saudi Arabia’s Al-Bilad newspaper who had the extremely bad judgment to tweet an imaginary convers...
The most likely victims of a nuclear armed Iran are not the U.S. orIsrael, but the Gulf states -- countries that are engaged in intense competition with the regime in Tehran, but t...
With leadership essentially contested among Arab states, it is hard to see how non-Arab states could hope to lead. Let me put it clearly: the Turkish and Iranian bids for regiona...
It’s no secret that Saudi Arabia will want nuclear weapons if Iran gets them. Riyadh has been saying so for years and said it again a couple of days ago. It ought to go without s...
Saudi Arabia is doing its best to bring about the end of Mr. Assad, whose Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, is a minority in a country with a plurality of Sunni Muslims....
Five places that aren't feeling the love this Valentine's Day....
The most important news out of the Middle East is not the Hamas-PA Agreement 4.0 (or 5.0 or 6.0, who can remember?). For various reasons, it doesn't seem likely to work (you can ...
The euphoria that accompanied the relatively quick removal of the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt soon gave way to the realization that such successes could not be easily replica...
By Yochi J. Dreazen BRAKA, United Arab Emirates"”The United Arab Emirates, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, is a land of firsts. Dubai, its richest city, has ...
As a country importing 11 percent of its oil from Iran, the latest American and European move to isolate Iran has put China in a quandary. Should it join the West with which it has...
Saudi Arabia prefers to work in the shadows, flexing its diplomatic weight without attracting too much attention. So it is surprising that its veteran foreign minister, Prince Saud...
Saudi Arabian threats that its military could join a Western-led conflict with Iran heap more pressure on Riyadh's Shi'ite rival. However, the House of Saud could invite isolation ...
In 2007 and 2009 Saudi King Abdullah capped a decade of legal and judicial reforms in his country by reorganizing the judiciary and ordering that Saudi Arabia follow the step that ...
As the exploitation of its own gas and oil resources leads to a future in which the United States washes its hands of Middle Eastern intractables and oil, Saudi Arabia's primacy in...
Washington has been cheering Beijing's recent initiative to increase its energy imports from the Saudi kingdom and its neighbors. Why? Because the more energy China buys from the...
It's obvious that Iran underestimated the depth of resentment the masses have of Shiite dominance in the Arab world....
The justification for the arms sale is simple. The deal will provide at least 50,000 jobs to Americans - good PR at a time of great economic distress. More importantly, it is int...
Although small shares of Saudi Arabia's adult population own businesses or plan to open them soon, Gallup surveys in 2011 reveal these shares are even smaller outside the three maj...
Why should 'American interests' determine the type of government Egypt has? That it should is simply embedded as an implicit, unstated assumption in Alterman’s advocacy. Th...
Women in Saudi Arabia won a small but promising victory this year. No, they aren't being allowed to drive; that's still forbidden. Most of the time, they still can't work, trave...
Our experiment in militarizing the region has made it more volatile, less free, and more costly to American interests and values....