The Caravan

Talk of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been heating up in recent weeks, with American officials visiting Riyadh to hammer out the terms of an agreement and Saudi and Israeli leaders sounding optimistic. But how close to such a deal are we really? Joshua Teitelbaum, a professor of Middle East history at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and an expert on Saudi Arabia, offers his insig...

After the Islamic State seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2013-14, the United States led a yearslong effort to roll back the group’s gains. Journalist and author Michael Gordon has written four books on the wars in Iraq, and in his latest,  Degrade and Destroy , he takes us inside the war on the Islamic State, detailing the key White House deliberations and military struggles that finally...

The special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 yielded a massive trove of documents never intended for publication, but in 2017 the CIA declassified them in their entirety. Nelly Lahoud, a scholar at New America, has written the first history of al-Qaeda based on a systematic reading of these documents, which lay bare the secrets of the group and serve to correct some existing nar...

Big things are shaping up in the Middle East as the Biden administration appears to be rethinking its get-tough policy on Saudi Arabia, even as it continues to hold out hope for a revived nuclear deal with Iran. Meanwhile, Russia looks poised to shut down a key humanitarian aid corridor in Syria, while the West may have a new opportunity for maintaining pressure on the regime of Bashar al-Asad. Jo...

In September 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria to save the regime of dictator Bashar al-Asad. President Obama predicted a “quagmire,” but that is not what followed. What is the nexus between the Russian intervention in Syria and the more recent Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine? What can the West learn from its failures in Syria that might apply to the case of Ukraine? Will...

On February 3, President Biden announced the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, the leader of the Islamic State, in a U.S. special forces raid on his hideout in northern Syria. The leader, better known as Hajji ‘Abdallah, had been the Islamic State’s so-called caliph since October 2019, following the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Who was Hajji ‘Abdallah and how did he end up in a small t...

Journalist and author Steve Coll examines the debates and decisions in Washington, Kabul, and Doha preceding the collapse of the Afghan government and the return to power of the Taliban. In a recent  article  in the New Yorker, Steve and coauthor Adam Entous document a “dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion” that characterized the diplomatic efforts to end the war in Afghanistan....

Ambassador Martin Indyk, a former diplomat and senior government official, discusses his new book  Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy . The book explores Kissinger’s diplomacy in the Middle East, focused as it was on achieving order and equilibrium in the context of the Cold War. Indyk argues that Kissinger’s order-based diplomacy and gradualist approach to th...

Tom Tugendhat was elected to Parliament in 2015, after military service in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In August he delivered a widely reported speech critical of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, insisting on the need for long-term patience of the sort America has displayed with great success in South Korea. In this podcast discussion, Tugendhat...

Alain Bifani has had an insider's view of Lebanese politics for decades as Director General of the Ministry of Finance. In this discussion he explores the origins of the current crisis in Lebanon in the historical corruption of the banking sector.  Entrenched interests, called "the cartel," have grown enormously rich at the expense of the impoverishment of the nation at large, especially the middl...

Elisabeth Kendall, a scholar of Arabic and jihadism at Oxford University, joins the podcast to discuss the state of the jihadi threat in Yemen, a country she knows well. The local franchises of al-Qaida and the Islamic State are weakened but continue to pose a significant threat. As Kendall argues, conditions in Yemen favor an al-Qaida resurgence. How have these groups changed over time and where...

Colonel (Ret.) Joel Rayburn knows the Middle East well. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Levant Affairs and Special Envoy for Syria during the Trump administration, after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also an accomplished historian, author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (Hoover Press) and co-author of the Army War College history of the Iraq War....

Asfandyar Mir, a noted expert on South Asia and terrorism, was in Kabul just weeks before the Taliban overran the country in mid-August. How did the Afghan government fall so fast and what will be the ramifications of the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the official name of the Taliban? Has the group changed since it last governed the country between 1996 and 2001? What is the nature...

Paul Wood served as BBC foreign correspondent for twenty-five years and is now a columnist for the The Spectator magazine in London. He has reported from a wide range of locations across the broad Middle East: Afghanistan, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Chechnya, Libya, Algeria, and Sudan including Darfur. He covered the invasion of Iraq from Baghdad in 2003 and the fighting in the Syrian Civil War f...

In September 2014, the Houthis, a revolutionary Islamist movement, seized control of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, precipitating a civil war in the country that continues to this day. Who are the main actors in the Yemen conflict? What is the role of the United States? What do the Houthis really want? Professor Bernard Haykel of Princeton University, a noted expert on Yemen, addresses these questio...

Ben Hubbard is the New York Times bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, and author of MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman (2020), a biography of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The conversation treats the Crown Prince's rise to power in the context of a Saudi Arabia marked by deeply conservative cultural formations and at the same time a very young population well connected to modern social...

In February, Martin Smith traveled to Idlib, Syria, where he became the first Western journalist to conduct an interview with Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, a U.S.-designated terrorist and the leader of the jihadi group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Once an official branch of al-Qaida under a different name, HTS controls Syria’s northwestern Idlib Province, where it has set up a government to manage the...

Facing neighbors fundamentally hostile to its existence, Israel has developed a multidimensional grand strategy. Assaf Orion initially described the development of this strategy in a Hoover essay here and he expands on the topic in this podcast conversation. He begins with comments on the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, which rules the Gaza strip, as well as the various military and poli...

Muhammad Reza Shah reigned from 1941 to 1979, when the Iranian Revolution ushered in the era of the Islamic Republic. In his book  The Last Shah , Ray Takeyh chronicles the period of last shah’s reign with a view to understanding the causes of the revolution. What role did the United States play in the coup of 1953? How much responsibility does the shah bear for what happened in 1979? Did Jimmy Ca...

Prior to 1979, Saudi Arabia and Iran, two Muslim monarchies--one Sunni and one Shia--were allied with the US in the Cold War against Communism. The Iranian Revolution changed that, as did the Saudi response to the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The two powers began to compete for regional primacy, especially through the export of their versions of politicized Islam. Kim Ghattas discusses he...

Wesley Morgan, a journalist and expert on military affairs, discusses his new book  The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley , as well as prospects for Afghanistan and counterterrorism following U.S. withdrawal.

Negotiations concerning a potential American return to the Iran Deal have opened in Vienna. The diplomacy is complex. While the JCPOA is generally treated as involving only the U.S. and Iran, it also includes Russia, China and three European countries: England, France and Germany. Germany is exceptional because it is (aside from Iran) the only non-nuclear power in the talks, but also because of it...

The Biden Administration is eager to reverse the Trump administration’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran and reenter the Iranian nuclear deal, or JCPOA. Xiyue Wang, who spent 40 months as a prisoner in Iran on false charges of espionage, shares his criticism of this approach. What is the nature of the Iranian regime? What is problematic about “Obama-style engagement”? And what should U.S. poli...

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is undergoing profound changes. With its young population, it faces a transition from a traditional, conservative society to one with greater rights, perhaps especially for women. The powerful young Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is driving some of these changes, which also concentrates power in his hands. The Biden administration has given him the cold shoulder bec...

U.S.-Turkish relations have hit a low point in recent years. Yet it is imperative, according to Michael Doran, that the United States and Turkey rediscover their common interests. What are the sources of conflict between the two countries? How should the United States see Turkey as it formulates Middle East strategy? What are the prospects for U.S.-Turkish relations under the Biden administration?