INTRODUCTION Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan told Notre Dame University students in May 1981, 'The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.'(Schweizer, 1994: 47) After nearly a decade, his edict became reality and the 'evil empire' collapsed together with its Marxist-Leninist ideology. The USSR's disintegration ended the Cold War … [Read more...]
Turkish Foreign Policy Toward the Middle East
By January 3, 2021
From the late 1980s on, the Cold War's end and the European Community's (EC) growing integration were factors seemingly requiring fundamental adjustments in foreign policy orientations by all European states. But states still had to decide whether or to what extent to revise their policies. Turkey was hesitant to adapt its stands in the face of the external environment's new shape. The forces of continuity proved powerful. Scholars such as Philip Robins, Sabri Sayari and William Hale have … [Read more...]
Under Netanyahu: The Current Situation in Israeli Politics
By January 2, 2021
On May 29, 1996, with a slender margin of only 30,000 votes (less than 1% of the Israeli vote but with a clear majority of 11 percent of the Jewish votes cast), Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres, thereby becoming Israel's first directly elected Prime Minister. Once again, and for the fifth time in his political career, Shimon Peres failed to receive the backing from the Israeli public and the election results illustrated clearly the already well-known fact that Israeli society was … [Read more...]
U.S. Middle East Policy in the Clinton Second Term
By January 1, 2021
Foreign policy may have played a lesser role in the November 1996 U.S. presidential election than at any time in the past sixty years. No more than 4% of voters nationwide indicated in public opinion polls that foreign policy mattered most in deciding how they voted, and in the all-important state of California the number citing foreign policy was less than 1%. Thus, it would seem a considerable exaggeration to suggest that comprehensive thinking about Middle East policy for the second term has … [Read more...]
