The UAE has witnessed foreign policy steps recently that many consider as turning points in its approaches to the outside world. The UAE National Security Advisor, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s visits to Turkey and Qatar in August has highlighted such a change. These visits represented a sudden breakthrough in the UAE’s relations with both countries, considered tense in recent years. So, what has led to this turning point?
In the past year, many have written on the normalization of relations between Israel and Arab states, focusing on economic interests and emphasizing shared security interests in the region. Case studies, however, indicate that relations between countries are improved when they encompass aspects related to the lives of citizens. Incorporating an element of cultural affinity between countries, a dimension that is far less susceptible to abrupt transformation, can serve as a means to stabilize bilateral relations in the face of unforeseen challenges, shifts in regional dynamics, or changes in leadership.
Iraq sees itself as a neutral and effective point of convergence in its divided regional periphery. The Baghdad conference also raised questions about the future trajectory and whether it was a nucleus for a new regional framework reflecting the reality of the emerging regional power relations or a mere transient moment that political and security shifts in Iraq and the region would overcome.
Many political, security and economic developments have combined to impose an important shift in the geopolitical map of the confluence of the three continents of the ancient world, namely Asia, Africa and Europe. This hastened the emergence of strong indications of the formation of a new strategic circle that constitutes the intersection of many international and regional interests, in the heart of which is the region of the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, i.e., the two circles that were traditionally seen as independent domains before becoming more interrelated in recent years in terms of international interactions along with the geographical connection that already exists through the Suez Canal.
On 21 September 2020, the Islamic Action Front (IAF, Jabhat al-Amal al-Islami) party in Jordan (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood) announced its participation in the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held on 10 November 2020, according to an IAF statement that was read by the IAF Deputy Secretary-General Wael al-Sakka. This paper analyses the implications of the IAF’s participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections, the challenges it faces, both from within it and in the surrounding environment, and the possible scenarios for the IAF’s tactics during the next phase.
The Saudi ASharq al-Awsat newspaper last month published a supplement entitled the Entanglements of Terror. In it, Saudi researchers and others try to sketch out the characteristics of the Islamist terror organizations and the phenomenon of the so-called modern Islamist terrorism in the region.
Currently, there is an unprecedented arms race by countries in the Arabian Gulf, mainly motivated by Iran’s nuclear project and Arab Gulf States might turn into frontline states in any future war with Iran.
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