Escalating hostilities between China and its neighbors over competing claims to the South China Sea is a test of China’s growing strength and a diplomatic challenge for the United States, which insis…

Julia Choucair, an expert on Lebanon, says even though many Lebanese people and several Arab governments criticized Hezbollah for instigating the crisis with Israel, the Israeli air attacks, includin…

F. Gregory Gause III, a leading Saudi Arabia expert, says the intensified Saudi diplomacy of recent weeks has been largely aimed at containing Iranian influence in the Middle East.

Jane Arraf, the Council’s Edward R. Murrow press fellow, who recently was CNN’s bureau chief in Baghdad, and earlier, the Reuters bureau chief in Amman, says what is striking about the continued terr…

Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that contrary to the hopes of many in the Bush administration, “I don…