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Forty years ago today, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) voted to raise the posted price of their oil by 70 percent.  The next day, several Arab oil producers decided to impose an embargo on oil sales to the United States to punish it for supporting Israel in the unfolding Yom Kippur War.  While the two decisions were not formally linked, policymakers have worried ever since that OPEC could again restrict the global supply of oil. A lot has changed since 1973.  Oil embargoes used to happen fairly frequently: There was one in 1956, and another in 1967.  Until 1973, they didn’t attract much attention.  But due to structural changes in the oil market in the early 1970s, the one in 1973 had a huge impact.  Since that time, there hasn’t been a single international embargo. (The current sanctions against Iran are an importers’ boycott, not an exporters’ embargo.)  What happened?

Even without an embargo, policymakers worry that OPEC manipulates the oil market. For example, James Woolsey, a former CIA director and self-proclaimed energy hawk, argues that OPEC has a grip on global oil and gasoline prices so tight that the U.S. will never be free of its influence.  Like most people, Woolsey wrongly believes that OPEC is a powerful cartel. Many economic studies cast doubt on that idea, but there are still some scholars who support the proposition. OPEC rarely if ever influences its members’ oil production rates.  It has almost no impact on prices.  My research looked at OPEC’s behavior since 1982, when it first adopted formal production quotas for its members.  I found that joining OPEC has little influence on new members’ oil production rates; members cheat on their quotas a whopping 96 percent of the time; changes in OPEC quotas have little impact on changes in production; and members of OPEC produce oil at about the same rate as non-members of the group, all else equal.  Any of these findings would cast doubt on OPEC’s status as a cartel; collectively they are damning.

Most OPEC members – from Venezuela to Nigeria to Iraq – are pumping their oil as fast as they can, with no spare capacity

The Trump administration assassinated Soleimani to compel change in Iran’s behavior and to throw a wrench in the gears of Iran’s expansive regional influence. Twelve months is too short a period to measure its impact in the realms of longstanding policy and force posture. Outside of some signs of disunity among some of Iraq’s Shiite militias, not much has changed. The impact of Soleimani’s death is therefore impossible to accurately gauge. What we can say is that his death unleashed an emotional and political wave that has surged from his legacy. It is driven almost entirely by his benefactors in Tehran and clients across the region and it is fueled by their desire to shape the memory of the man, myth and legend they helped create.

To some, his death was small justice, an emphatic ending to the life of a man who served as the backbone of Assad’s brutal war against the Syrian people and facilitated the empowerment of corrupt, coercive militias in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon. To others, particularly his supporters and patrons, Soleimani was a hero: a leader in the war against ISIS and a champion of the Shiite Muslim minority.

To appreciate the complexity threaded throughout varying perceptions of Soleimani, it’s essential to understand what he symbolizes to Iran, to his military, and to the foreign groups he worked so closely with.

adviser to President-elect Donald Trump said the new US leader will “review” the Iran nuclear agreement, but will stop short of ripping up the landmark international pact.

signaled that Trump might not move the US Embassy to Jerusalem immediately and indicated he would make negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal a priority right off the bat.

“He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion,” Phares added. “It could be a tense discussion but the agreement as is right now — $750 billion to the Iranian regime without receiving much in return and increasing intervention in four countries — that is not going to be accepted by the Trump administration.”

The Entente powers defeated the Central powers, the latter comprising first and foremost Germany but also, importantly for the future of the Middle East, the Ottoman empire, which ostensibly controlled the Levant — what today comprises most of what we know as Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and Iraq. The Entente victory essentially allowed for the implementation of Sykes-Picot.

various Western-dominated conferences solidified the main components of Sykes-Picot into the mandate system, which was officially meant as a mechanism of transition for Middle Eastern peoples and their allotted territories toward independence, but in reality it just replaced Ottoman suzerainty with that of British and French colonial control. What emerged were largely artificial constructions that reflected British and French competition and imperial (mostly geostrategic and oil pipeline) interests rather than the natural ethnic, religious, economic and geographic contours of the region itself. It was to all intents and purposes the imposition of the Western-based Westphalian nation-state system onto the Middle East. Centuries of pre-existing orientations were cast aside.

for the most part the Ottomans, despite the stresses and strains that confronted them in the 1700s and 1800s leading up to the Great War, bargained and negotiated their way with local powers to produce relative stability

"It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide," Erdogan told ruling party members.

Syrian President Bashar Assad earlier Sunday urged Turkey to maintain good relations with Israel, in order to mediate Damascus-Jerusalem peace negotiations.

During Ehud Olmert's tenure as prime minister, Turkey mediated five rounds of talks between Israeli and Syrian officials. Toward the end of Olmert's term the two sides were on the verge of resuming direct negotiations. At the last meeting between Olmert and Erdogan, the Turkish leader called Syrian President Bashar Assad and relayed messages to and from Olmert. But after Operation Cast Lead earlier this year and the freeze in negotiations with Syria, Erdogan said Olmert had stabbed him in the back.

David Cameron yesterday denounced all opponents of his plans to bomb Syria as “terrorist sympathisers”. That makes me a terrorist sympathiser as well, and places me in distinguished company.

he has come to share the disastrous analysis of G W Bush after 9/11. The United States president’s notorious statement that “You are either with us or against us” left no room for argument or discussion.Intelligent critics in the United States were cast into the political darkness. With a very few honourable exceptions, the opposition Democratic party rallied behind Bush as the commander-in-chief, gave him sweeping new powers and saluted smartly as he led the United States into his disastrous war in Iraq. US allies had the choice of joining in the US “war on terror” or themselves coming under suspicion or attack.The events of the last 14 years have exposed this way of looking at the world as simple-minded and calamitous. If we have learnt anything from the Iraq War, it is that actions, however well intended, can have unintended consequences.

War is specially serious, as it always involves loss of life and causes such suffering. This does not mean that we should never fight a war, but it makes it outrageous when war is used for partisan political advantage.David Cameron and his fellow Tory strategists have been doing exactly that for more than a week. He has been using the argument on Syria to cause chaos in the Labour Party.

the White House is embarking on an economic offensive intended to collapse the Iranian government, which is already contending with a steady tempo of internal unrest driven by economic and political frustrations

Those who have lamented Obama’s restraint in the Middle East will now have another taste of its antithesis: the purposeful American disruption of the status quo underpinned by the assumption that things can only get better. Unfortunately, that rarely holds true in the Middle East

It’s not just oil: U.S. sanctions will be felt across every aspect of the Iranian economy, although in theory, agricultural products, medicines, and medical devices are exempted. In practice, the repercussions are sweeping and unpredictable

According to officials in Riyadh, London and Washington DC, Bin Laden had by then become the world’s number one counter-terrorism target, a man who was bent on using Saudi citizens to drive a wedge between eastern and western civilisations. “There is no doubt that he deliberately chose Saudi citizens for the 9/11 plot,” a British intelligence officer tells me. “He was convinced that was going to turn the west against his ... home country. He did indeed succeed in inciting a war, but not the one he expected.”

Hamza bin Laden’s continued rise may well cloud the family’s attempts to shake off their past. It may also hinder the crown prince’s efforts to shape a new era in which Bin Laden is cast as a generational aberration, and in which the hardline doctrines once sanctioned by the kingdom no longer offer legitimacy to extremism. While change has been attempted in Saudi Arabia before, it has been nowhere near as extensive as the current reforms. How hard Mohammed bin Salman can push against a society indoctrinated in such an uncompromising worldview remains an open question.

On the night of Wednesday, August 29, 2018, six Tunisian fishermen were arrested in Italy. Earlier that day, they had set off from their hometown of Zarzis, the last important Tunisian port before Libya, to cast their nets in the open sea between North Africa and Sicily. The fishermen then sighted a small vessel whose engine had broken, and that had started taking in water. After giving the fourteen passengers water, milk and bread – which the fishermen carry in abundance, knowing they might encounter refugee boats in distress – they called the Italian coastguard, who told them they’d be coming soon. After hours of waiting, though, the men decided to tow the smaller boat in the direction of Lampedusa – Italy’s southernmost island – to help Italian authorities in their rescue operations. At around 24 miles from Lampedusa, the Guardia di Finanza (customs police) took the fourteen people on board, and then proceeded to violently arrest the six fishermen. According to the precautionary custody order issued by the judge in Agrigento (Sicily), the men stand accused of smuggling, a crime that could get them up to fifteen years of jail if the case goes to trial. The fishermen have since been held in Agrigento prison, and their boat has been seized.

Criminalising rescue, a process that has been pushed by different Italian governments since 2016, will continue to have tragic consequences for people on the move in the Mediterranean Sea

Among those arrested is Chamseddine Bourassine, the president of the Association “Le Pêcheur” pour le Développement et l’Environnement, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for the Zarzis fishermen’s continuous engagement in saving lives in the Mediterranean.

Bolton recalled that former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said that Yemen’s 1990 vote against the authorization of force against the then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be the most expensive vote they ever cast. “And we did cut their foreign aid,” Bolton said. “And there needs to be more of that.”

“The goodwill that the U.S. has in the world has largely been the result of the perception of international good citizenship,”

In a memo sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by the agency’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in early March and described to Foreign Policy, the nation’s most senior diplomat was given the option to cut up to $300 million in U.S. military aid to Egypt over the death of Mustafa Kassem, a dual American and Egyptian citizen who appealed unsuccessfully to U.S. President Donald Trump to secure his release in his final days.

In a letter sent late last month, Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy and Chris Van Hollen also urged Pompeo to withhold $300 million in military assistance to Cairo and to sanction any Egyptian official “directly or indirectly responsible” for Kassem’s imprisonment and death

In two years on the job, Pompeo has twice decided to overlook human rights considerations to greenlight military aid to Egypt, leading some experts to cast doubt on whether the Trump administration will make cuts even after the death of a U.S. citizen.

The problem, of course, is that when a state’s actions and its government’s policies cannot be critiqued, then the pursuit of knowledge and academic freedom are threatened. If successful, Israel’s use of the anti-Semitism charge to silence serious and well-grounded criticism could very well become the template for other countries, including the United States government, and powerful corporations to mobilize different kinds of hate-speech accusations to protect rights-abusive behavior.

the examples marginalize the kinds of anti-Jewish attacks in recent years -- from Pittsburgh to Halle, Germany -- that have resulted in mass casualties or the broader rise of fascism in the United States with its deeply ingrained anti-Semitism, as evidenced by the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

not surprising that concern about the IHRA definition has been growing. Professional associations, such as the British Society for Middle East Studies, student groups and more than 100 Palestinian and Arab academics and intellectuals have argued that the IHRA definition is being used to stifle not just criticism of Israel but also, and more widely, support for Palestinian rights. Roughly 200 international scholars working in anti-Semitism studies and related fields -- including Jewish, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine and Middle East studies -- just drafted the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, a new definition that responds to the IHRA one and is inspired by the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the 1969 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Their aim is twofold: 1) to strengthen the fight against anti-Semitism by clarifying what it is and how it is manifested and 2) to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile, 40 Jewish organizations including the fastest growing -- and explicitly anti-Zionist -- Jewish organization in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace, have “unequivocally opposed” the IHRA definition, precisely because its focus on Israel gives the definition a “strong potential for misuse.”

Mahmoud al-Sisi, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s son and a senior official in the powerful General Intelligence Service (GIS), is being reassigned to a long-term position at Egypt’s diplomatic delegation in Moscow

perception within the president’s inner circle that Mahmoud al-Sisi has failed to properly handle a number of his responsibilities and that his increasingly visible influence in the upper decision-making levels of government is having a negative impact on his father’s image

suggestion that the president’s son be sidelined also came from senior government figures in the United Arab Emirates, a close and influential ally of Egypt, who view Mahmoud al-Sisi’s role as having become damaging to the president

Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.

in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.

His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.

Egypt's security apparatus has a reputation abroad, and it's not a good one. Government officials, diplomats and agents of the state routinely document the activities of those who criticize the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi

their activities gained a significant boost following the 2013 coup that unseated Mohammed Morsi, the country's first democratically elected president, and installed Sissi as its leader

For critics, the message was unmistakably clear: Those who refuse to fall in line would meet the same fate as Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally killed in October 2018 by a team of Saudi agents after entering the Saudi consulate services in Istanbul. "It was a message to dissidents like myself that the game had changed. No longer were dissidents living abroad safe," said Amr Khalifa, an Egyptian journalist and political analyst residing in the US. "It has been read as a carte blanche by autocracies like Sissi's, especially after the incredibly docile reaction of the Trump administration."