A New Middle East Policy

Recently a group of Republican national security experts, mostly academics and former officials, joined to produce Choosing to Lead, a volume aimed at describing what a foreign policy for a new Republican administration in 2017 should look like.  I contributed the chapter on Israel and the Arabs, and it can be found here.

Here’s one paragraph:

Sharing common enemies, Israel and its Arab neighbors have obvious common security interests. They face a dangerous enemy in Iran, newly enriched by the end of international sanctions and the unfreezing of more than $100 billion in assets. They also face a group of non-state and semi-state actors, the jihadis of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the powerful Iranian-backed Hizballah. Meanwhile, the prospect of major conventional warfare between the Arab states and Israel is virtually nil. What is so striking now is that, although the United States managed to maintain balanced and friendly relations with Israel and the Arabs for decades, even when they were nearly at war (and sometimes even when they were at war), today we have poor relations with both sides just when their own relations are the least fraught in their history.

The entire volume can be found at this web address.