Saudi Arabia’s massive air campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen initiated a major shift from the Kingdom’s traditional policy of restraint, to a force-based foreign policy approach unofficially dubbed the “Salman Doctrine.” The doctrine aimed at repositioning the Kingdom as the Middle East’s preeminent power by rolling back its archrival Iran. This commentary argues that the Kingdom has made hardly any progress on the war and diplomatic fronts so far to achieve this objective, due mainly to a glaring mismatch between the doctrine’s ends and the means to achieve these ends.
Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, sought to chart out an independent course for Iran in regional and global affairs: ‘neither East, nor West, the Islamic Republic.’ Khomeini’s successors have often attempted to compromise with the West by undertaking economic reforms aimed at reintegrating Iran into the imperialistic capitalist world economy. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in mid-July 2015, brings Iran new opportunities but it also greatly compromises the ideological, philosophical and economic foundations of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. After four decades of anti-imperialist struggle, Iran has now largely come back to the fold of imperialism.
President Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential race with promises to restore America’s lost image and status in the world, to lead the world again to achieve peace and dignity, and to start a “new beginning” with Muslims worldwide. This article examines Obama’s promised “new beginning” with Muslims in the Middle East and assesses his Middle East policy to determine whether his policy marks a break from the previous George W. Bush administration’s Mideast policy. First, it presents a comparative discussion on Bush’s and Obama’s Mideast policies and then turns to analyze a series of important issues that critically affects US-Mideast relations. It concludes that in the last five years (2009-2013) President Obama has, at best, achieved a mixed record –in some cases his approach has produced positive outcomes, in other cases, his policy is more a continuation of George W. Bush’s policy.
Proponents of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, commonly referred to as R2P, claim that it came of age with NATO’s successful military intervention to protect the civilian population in Libya. This commentary raises questions of whether NATO’s intervention under UN Security Council Resolution 1973 followed the original 2001 R2P report and other related UN documents, and contends that if R2P had come of age with NATO’s intervention in Libya, it has had a tragic death with the Security Council’s inability to initiate actions on Syria. The death of R2P in Syria has been rendered inevitable by NATO’s abuses in Libya, and the doctrine is doomed to a bleak future.