On March 25, Donald Trump signed an order proclaiming U.S. support for Israel’s annexation of the Golan. This act ended Washington’s opposition to any acquisition of territory by force– a principle that has been a key pillar of the global order since the United Nations was founded in 1945. Washington’s new policy on Golan may well now allow the US company Genie Energy to go ahead and plunder the oil and gas reserves that its Israeli subsidiary discovered in Golan in 2015, and Trump’s step changes the political dynamic within Syria, too.
President Donald Trump today announced over social media the U.S. should recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that was captured in the June 1967 war.
Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria is “foreign policy malpractice,” says Michele Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s would-be defense secretary, echoing the D.C. establishment’s horror at Trump’s fulfillment of a campaign promise. Sadly, the realists and leftwingers who have an alternative vision for US foreign policy in the wake of the Iraq disaster and the Syrian civil war have been exiled by the media.
Dangerous rumblings of war continue in the Mideast, the day after Israeli warplanes and surface-to-surface…
There are ominous signs that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi Crown Prince are pushing for a wider war in the Mideast. In a dangerous escalation, Israel last night attacked an Iranian military base near Syria’s capital, Damascus, using both warplanes and surface-to-surface missiles.
Israel backed al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria in an effort to weaken Bashar al-Assad and Iran. The effort has failed and now Israel and Saudi Arabia are turning their attention to Lebanon where two mysterious events over the past week indicate that Hezbollah may be in Israel’s sights.
Ahmad Kabariti reports from Gaza on how the unfolding crisis in the Gulf around Qatar could move Hamas closer to Iran, or cripple the group in its power struggle with the Palestinian Authority.
The abrupt announcement that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Yemen, the Maldive Islands, and the eastern government in divided Libya have broken all economic and political ties with Qatar has given rise to a tsunami of conjecture, wild speculation, and most of all, to wishful thinking and doomsday worries. Richard Falk untangles the threads of the story so far what it could mean for U.S. foreign policy in the region.