As America remains girded against religious fundamentalism in Iran and elsewhere around the world, consider that American democracy itself constitutes a fundamentalist religion.
Every time Iran is in the news, the same old myths about the country’s politics seem to fill the airwaves and the print media, fueled by politicians and commentators. By far the most important myth is the one that divides the regime between hardliners and moderates. According to this view, a significant part of...
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This is an issue between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the U.S. government should stay out of it. This is not our fight.
If Iran’s behavior supporting friendly proxy groups in the Middle East isn’t exactly stabilizing, the behavior of U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and UAE, certainly hasn’t been any better.
Despite President Trump’s aggressive stance toward Iran, the encouragement from Saudi Arabia is out of line for several reasons.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a debate on the PBS program, Point Taken with Carlos Watson. The program brings together four experts in different fields to debate relevant and controversial topics. The goal of the show is to inform, to present viewers and the live audience with different...
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Venezuela is the world’s most miserable country, according to a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University who have calculated a World Misery Index. “Misery” is measured as the sum of a country’s inflation rate, unemployment rate, and interest rate, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita. The higher the total...
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Will the collapse of oil prices benefit or erode petrodictators in the Middle East, Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America? At first glance, the answer would seem obvious. Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran need crude prices as high as $110 per barrel to fund their states in their present condition. Russia, half of whose government budget...
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Responding to their customers’ increasing demand for privacy in the aftermath of revelations by whistle-blowers that the government is capturing and indefinitely storing every conversation, email, location, online transaction, and more, Apple, Google, WhattsApp, and others are developing new encrypted phones and services to thwart this now-universal warrantless spying. Simultaneously, a bill that would...
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One remarkable aspect in the recent fall in global oil prices is that Saudi Arabia has not cut production to prop them up. Much of the speculation about why the Saudis have sat by passively and allowed the oil price decline has been that they are trying to undermine higher-cost producers in the US...
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