Christopher Dickey
Essay
Fall
1987
Syria's alliances have shown more signs of shifting than any other relationships, hostile or friendly, in the Middle East, but the West has little scope at the moment for exploiting the situation. Assad faces many challenges, not least from within his own country. The USSR and Iran are the most important of his few allies. But Moscow's new policies of forging ties with Middle Eastern countries and the PLO often contradict those of Damascus, while Teheran has tried to use the alliance to promote political expansion in the Lebanon, wherein Assad's own hopes lie for achieving a Greater Syria.
Capsule Review
Spring
1984
Essay
Special
1983
A few days after Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Lawrence Pezzullo gave a long interview in his Managua office. "It's going to be our ideological blinders that may cause us to make mistakes," Pezzullo said, as he considered Central America policy under the new President. "This is a new Administration, there are going to be tradeoffs, and you've got to feed your right-wing somewhere. Maybe you'll just let them eat up Latin America. It's cheaper than some other places like the Middle East, the Soviet Union or China, where no president is going to have much room for radical policy changes." He paused and reflected for a moment. "That's the way I tend to think things will go," he said, "just feed it to the lions."
