Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Over the last year the Islamic State gained control of a substantial portion of Syria's energy resources and infrastructure, providing leverage over the regime and depriving it of much needed revenue.
With the recent capture of the city of Palmyra, the Islamic State has reasserted its anti-Assad credentials and put another tremendous economic strain on the Syrian government.
If Syrian rebels are to make political headway with wider social constituencies, they will have to demonstrate a far higher level of military coordination, political skills, and administrative capacity.
The Syrian regime looks increasingly brittle. This has major implications for what might follow a nuclear deal with Iran, and indeed for what may follow if a deal is not reached.
The Joint List’s approach to engagement offers Palestinians a model for political action. But it also highlights the contradictions and tensions inherent to Palestinian approaches over the past 22 years.
The self-proclaimed Islamic State has borrowed almost all of their methods of control from Saddam-era tactics.
Until Egyptian and Tunisian governments reform their security sectors, the culture of police impunity will deepen and democratic transition will remain impossible for both countries.
Egypt’s current foreign policy activism is more show than substance. The temptation to expand this approach by intervening in Libya will only reveal Egypt’s vulnerabilities and deepen them further.
The Assad regime’s belief that, by hanging tough, it will compel the United States both to accept its terms and make its regional allies follow suit is a high-risk gamble.
2015 begins with new proposals to resolve the conflict, but 2014 has shown that even dramatic geo-political and military changes can leave the conflict dynamic unaltered and the stalemate unbroken.
