Middle East

Flynt Leverett, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, says the idea of providing a defense umbrella over the Gulf is not a new ...

The following segment is part of a live debate between the New America Foundation's Daniel Levy and the American Enterprise Institute's David Frum. The debate was hosted by TheEconomist.com and moderated by Xan Smiley.

Please join the New American Foundation and our co-sponsor, Americans for Peace Now, for a briefing by Michael Sfard, followed by an end of day wine reception.  Mr. Sfard is Israel's pre-eminent legal expert on settlements and the challenges posed by the broader infrastructure of Israeli occupation to the daily life of Palestinians, to the two-state solution, to American policy and to Israel's democracy.

Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council who has long advocated engaging Iran, notes that President Nixon opened relations with China under Mao Zedong, who is held responsible for more peacetime deaths of his own people than Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union.

"Foreign policy is not about making you feel good," he says. "It's about serving interests." Original article

This week, Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell met in New York with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to begin discussing a potential "compromise" regarding the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. Israel's continued settlement expansion has been at the top of America's Middle East agenda since Obama's Cairo speech in June, when he declared that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

The US and Israel continue to debate the issue of settlements in the West Bank as Secretary Clinton hosts Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation says the timing might be right for U.S. leadership...Link to video

"These are the most significant demonstrations in the history of the Islamic Republic over the past 30 years," said Afshin Molavi, a former Reuters journalist who is now a scholar at the New America Foundation, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, ...

Observers on the dovish side, such as former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation, believe that maintaining a tough stance on the settlement issue is crucial for success of the process. ...

"However minor it may seem, however wrapped up in negatives, it is something to build on," wrote former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, on the Prospects for Peace blog. "It is also clearly something that cannot be left to the parties themselves ...