Maryland: Barry Rubin

By Barry Rubin
Without realizing it, Westerners constantly empower Islamism and other reactionary forces in the Muslim-majority countries. Here’s a good example, thanks to a Turkish reader, Okan Altiparmak. Speaking at the Bosphorus Conference in Istanbul, November 2, 2009, former President Bill Clinton thinks he’s being a nice, genial, non-arrogant, sympathetic American while blithely handing out [...]

By Barry Rubin
The United States–along with Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany–met with Iran in Geneva and officials, media, and experts proclaim it a success. Was its nuclear program what Iran defused or merely Western pressure?
It is widely claimed that the meeting in Geneva obtained three great achievements toward ending the long-running Iran nuclear arms’ [...]

By Barry Rubin
The great French diplomatist Talleyrand put it best: “That’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.”
By accepting the Iranian proposal for negotiations, the Obama Administration has just made the most important foreign policy decision of its term so far. And it is a very bad mistake, a very bad one indeed.
True, the [...]

By Barry Rubin
I’m beginning to understand the Obama administration strategy, at least in its initial phase, as a “bridge too far” approach. That expression came after the heroic Allied operation at Arnheim in World War Two, when what seemed a clever idea—to capture a key bridge far ahead of the existing Allied lines—turned into a [...]