Many of the Arab states see the uprisings, the Iraq war, and the rise of ISIS as fundamentally related. All of these issues are complicated by the Iran deal.

Barack Obama has tried to reduce American involvement in the region, but events keep pulling him back in. Iraq and Syria are spiraling out of control, while allies only make things worse.

Not only was the paramount role of the military unimpeded after the exit of Mubarak, but other key institutions were undiminished in their power.

This is a period laden with potential for the growth of freedom, but also heavy with risks and challenges for the United States.

Uprisings in North Africa have electrified the world and inaugurated a new era in the region, but their outcomes are uncertain. The old order could yet prove resilient.

As the us commitment to substantive reform has waned, Egypt's liberal activists find themselves subject to increasing surveillance and intimidation. …

Never before has a country committed itself to so fundamental and dramatic a transformation of a major region of the world as the United States has in the Middle East since 2001… . It remains to be seen how well the rhetoric of promoting reform will weather the experience of promoting reform.

In Iraq the United States appears to have checkmated itself, maneuvered into the calamitous position of being unable to exit easily or stay safely.

No matter who rules in Baghdad, George Bush will have to decide between the role of statesman and politician in Arab–Israeli peacemaking.

Largely missing from American discussions about Islam is any appreciation of the debates within Islam and the widely variant interpretations by Muslims of their own religion. Beyond the core belief shared by all Muslims that there is only one God and Muhammad was the messenger of God, there are many ‘Islams,’ depending on locale, education, custom, politics, and personal attitudes.

Will America now define national security as it did half a century ago to see the betterment of others' conditions as key to ensuring its own safety and well-being? Or will it be satisfied merely to aggressively police the frontiers of hostility at home and abroad to reduce the likelihood of a new terrorist-inflicted disaster?

Over the past decade it has become fashionable in Washington to believe that only when a situation is ‘ripe’—that is, when the belligerents are ‘hurting’—should the United States expend diplomatic capital, and especially the scarcest resource of all, the president's time, to seek a solution. This perspective exhibits common-sense wisdom, but it also harbors a rationale for avoiding tough, complex issues.