Jordan
Snapshot,
January 5, 2011
A standing army in the West Bank will not keep Israelis safe. But a multilateral security agreement could.
Snapshot,
March 12, 2009
In the Middle East, old-fashioned balance-of-power politics are back. To successfully play the game, the United States should pay close attention to the Arab-Israeli peace process, while keeping Iran off balance.
Essay,
Nov/Dec
1993
The Israeli-PLO peace accord has reignited Jordan's historical identity crisis. King Hussein, the Hashemite ruler of a large Palestinian population, must walk a fine line. Native Jordanians, his bedrock support, fear becoming a minority in their own land. With the prospect of a new Palestinian state, they may want Jordan's Palestinians to choose allegiance. By renouncing the Palestinians, however, the king could lose the economic base he needs to maintain Jordan's stability. To which of his competing constituencies Hussein tilts will determine his kingdom's future.
Essay,
Spring
1982
After more than a third of a century of conflict, the Middle East remains the greatest threat to international peace and security. In a fitting close to 1981, and as if to signal its own recognition of the fact, and further ensure that the so-called Camp David accords can never lead to a general settlement, the Israeli government enacted legislation that for all intents and purposes annexes the Syrian Golan Heights to Israel. And a new chapter in the conflict begins.
Essay,
Oct
1974
In mid-November of last year, I concluded an article for Foreign Affairs on the October War and the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict by saying that a resolution of the conflict had at last become a real possibility for the parties directly concerned, and an imperative necessity for all the outsiders that have been involved in it. I added that a successful wedding of the outside powers' need to the possibilities latent in the situation required sensitivity to the fundamental concerns of the parties, imaginative diplomacy, and statesmanlike timing. In the nine months that have elapsed since I wrote those words, the United States, Europe and Japan, and up to this point the Soviet Union, have given ample evidence of their eagerness for peace. The United States in particular has taken the lead in trying to promote an Arab-Israeli settlement, and Secretary of State Kissinger has twice treated the world to breathtaking experiments in diplomacy, shuttling between half a dozen capitals to sustain two "campaigns" of negotiations of hitherto unprecedented intensity.
Essay,
Apr
1970
After more than 50 years of Zionist activities-among them many decades over the international diplomatic front-and on looking back on the experiences gained in the 20 years of the existence of the state of Israel, I am beginning to have doubts as to whether the establishment of the state of Israel as it is today, a state like all other states in structure and form, was the fullest accomplishment of the Zionist idea and its twofold aim: to save Jews suffering from discrimination and persecution by giving them the opportunity for a decent and meaningful life in their own homeland; second, to ensure the survival of the Jewish people against the threat of disintegration and disappearance in those parts of the world where they enjoy full equality of rights. In expressing and explaining these thoughts, I want to make it clear that I have no doubt as to the historical justification and moral validity of Zionism. The concentration of a large part of the Jewish people in their own national home, where they are masters of their destiny, seems to me to be the only way to solve what has been called for centuries "the Jewish problem."
Essay,
Jul
1969
During the months that followed the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, the view gradually gained ground in the West that the Arab defeat represented a considerable Russian victory. Some more imaginative observers argued that the Russians had deliberately engineered both the war and the defeat in order to achieve this result; others, without going as far as to ascribe conscious purpose, nevertheless agreed that, by increasing the hostility of the Arabs to the West and their dependence on the Soviet Union, the crisis, the war and their aftermath had greatly strengthened the Soviet political and strategic position in the Middle East and correspondingly weakened that of the United States. Observers and commentators spoke with mounting anxiety about the growth of Soviet influence in the area and the threat which it offered to the interests of the free world.
Essay,
Jan
1968
THE recent Six Day War in the Middle East grew out of the sterile confrontation to which the peoples of the region had committed themselves over the past twenty years. Both parties had frequently proclaimed their intention to go to war under certain circumstances. It seems unlikely, however, that any of them plotted and planned war for 1967. It seems more likely that they blundered into it.
