Let’s Talk about Yemen

Yemen’s weaknesses and strengthens are the focus of a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment. On one side, the author stresses the country’s natural resources, with oil and natural gas on the frontline. On the other, the report stresses Yemen’s incapability of managing these same resources (and many others) due to both its political structure and insecurity in the region more generally. It should not all be about the oil. According to the author, the fact that Yemen’s oil has ena...

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Dead on Arrival

Bashar al-Assad made a decision in the early days of the uprising that the state that his father had built, and the position that it provided for both his own family and his long historically neglected minority sect in Syria, the Allawites, was too big to fail. As well, the Assad regime has had a long running history of enmity with the conservative Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has been at heart of these protests. It’s not surprising that the protests first started in the plains surro...

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