From our UK edition
For all but the most harried journalist motivated by a need to pay off the mortgage, the annual G20 summit – being held this weekend in Buenos Aires – is typically viewed as a perfect cure for insomnia. Who will stand next to whom in the family photo? Will the wording of a final statement
The media’s hypocrisy over Jamal Khashoggi stinks. The president is wise to ignore it
After the Khashoggi murder, the Saudi regime seems curiously pliant to western interests
From our UK edition
It says something about the level of political discourse in America that Donald Trump decided to trumpet sanctions on Iran not with a speech, but a Twitter meme in reference to Game of Thrones. ‘Sanctions are coming,’ he says – in a picture that might be funny if it were not so serious. The White
It would be surprising if Trump’s Middle East policy is determined by the murder of a Muslim Brotherhood activist who happened to write an occasional column for the Washington Post
It’s a murky business. But the President can again prove his diplomatic skill
From our UK edition
As someone who spent three decades working closely with intelligence services in the Arab world and the West, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife.
Post-Vietnam, the US has acted militarily like the proverbial school-yard bully, picking fights only with the weaklings who can’t fight back.
If we learned anything from the so-called Arab Spring, it’s that the victors in that part of the world are never the pro-Western ones we bet on.
From our UK edition
Amid the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed the most tangible outcome of this week’s Helsinki summit. In the lead-up to his face-to-face talk with Vladimir Putin, senior US and Russian diplomats — in close coordination with leaders from mutual ally Israel —
From our UK edition
In an interview this week, Mohammad bin Salman offered an extraordinarily frank assessment of how to combat terrorism. It means rooting out Islamist ideology, he said, as much as sharing intelligence. He presumably would take this blunt message to MI5 and MI6 in his meetings with those agencies, as well as to Theresa May’s National
From our UK edition
Amid the avalanche of news coming from Saudi Arabia, the most important has been overlooked. A few weeks ago Riyadh ceded control of the Grand Mosque in Brussels, leased to the Saudis in 1969 and since then instrumental in promoting Islamic supremacy, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic hatred in the heart of Europe. The deal had given
From our UK edition
Is Iran on the brink of a revolution? The mullahs’ main political adversaries in Washington and Tel Aviv appear to think so, as does much of the western media. With the Wall Street Journal reporting that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps is taking charge of security in Tehran, it is equally clear that the regime
From our UK edition
Until last weekend, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh’s exclusive Diplomatic Quarter was colloquially known as the Princes’ Hotel. It was a luxurious retreat from the heat, where royals could engage in the kind of wheeling and dealing with the global business elite that had made them millionaires on the back of the 1970s oil boom. No
From our UK edition
Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you get an idea of the hysteria currently surrounding gay men in Egypt. That’s not an arbitrary analogy. The social ramifications of coming out as a ‘gay man’ in most parts of the Middle East are
From our UK edition
When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin
From our UK edition
The Saudi town of Awamiya — like so many countless cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen that are witnessing an unleashing of the ancient hatred of Sunni for Shia — now exists in name only. Last month, days before an assault on its Shia inhabitants by the Saudi regime, the UN designated it a place
From our UK edition
The Saudi town of Awamiya — like so many countless cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen that are witnessing an unleashing of the ancient hatred of Sunni for Shia — now exists in name only. Last month, days before an assault on its Shia inhabitants by the Saudi regime, the UN designated it a place
From our UK edition
Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk named Abed al-Hamid Hakim. The subject was the blockade of Qatar imposed by the Saudis and a couple of other despotic Sunni Arab rulers to punish the country for its ties to Iran, Hamas and
From our UK edition
When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph,
