"The good times are over," a Doha-based diplomat told me glumly last week, as if foretelling the political earthquake about to hit Qatar. On March 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain announced in a joint statement that they were withdrawing their ambassadors...

   Two developments took place in the past month that point to remarkable changes within Syria's Islamist landscape. In early February, al Qaeda's central leadership disavowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) -- a favor ISIS repaid a few weeks later, when it...

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was  a world in which  “ the tide of war is receding ” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces....

Friends of mine who just came from Damascus described how the city transformed into a ghost city, and how depressing it is to walk in its up-scaled residential areas such as Abu Romana , Al Malki, which have become dark and empty of its people . Even though these areas...