All Policy Analysis by Anna Borshchevskaya

Institute scholars share their insights into how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rapid fall of the country to the Taliban will affect the American strategic position across the Middle East and our relationships with allies, partners, and adversaries

Moscow has repeatedly played actors off each other to secure its own interests and keep the Assad regime in power.

Despite its consistent rhetoric toward Moscow, the administration has not yet demonstrated its strategic understanding that ceding too much operating space to Russia will hurt U.S. efforts to confront China.

Moscow would have the world believe that the best route to stability is legitimizing a dictator who plunged his country into war and destabilized the entire Middle East.

If Washington continues to deprioritize the Middle East, Russia will accelerate its convergence with Iran and essentially determine Syria’s future, which could result in a more explicit and dangerous nexus between these actors.

Moscow is using calibrated military power and complex diplomacy to persuade Turkey, Qatar, and other countries to back its solutions.

Wishful thinking aside, Moscow will continue to push solely for its own interests in these discussions, which for the foreseeable future means empowering Assad.

Moscow has intensified its military deployments in sensitive areas and continued its counterproductive diplomatic track, exhibiting a long-game mindset that Washington needs to match.

To expand its strategic influence on the Mediterranean, Moscow is exploiting Beirut and Hezbollah’s crisis at a time when the West seems uncertain about how much to intervene.

Simply waiting for Russia to decline has not prevented the Kremlin's aggressive and destabilizing behavior in various regions, and may even have encouraged it.

Washington has prioritized counterterrorism for years and is only now shifting to great-power competition, but Moscow has never lost sight of geopolitics, and its actions in the region should be seen through that lens.

The omissions in Moscow’s statements on the U.S. operation are as revealing as the predictable hyperbole and hypocrisy.

In seeking to salvage the JCPOA, Biden should not assume cooperation from Moscow, but instead focus on building a unified strategy that strengthens the U.S. negotiating position.

Institute Senior Fellow Anna Borshchevskaya explains the implications of countrywide protests across the Russian Federation.

Although Moscow and Ankara are pursuing different aims in Syria, Libya, and the South Caucasus, they have managed to avoid direct confrontation.

As the Kremlin continues to undermine Western values, institutions, and influence while expressing distorted views of counterterrorism, liberals would do well to keep defending liberalism.

The country need not be a top foreign policy priority, but the Biden administration would be wise to invest in Iraqi security, unity, and democracy amid competition with Russia, China, and Iran.

Moscow conducts far more soft-power activity in the region than one might suspect, using subversive and opaque versions of the same tools employed by the West.

Neither Moscow nor Ankara is interested in genuine peace; they are using the disputed region to their own ends, and Russia remains the only actor who can talk to all sides.

The fact that American rather than Russian mediation helped broker a major Middle East peace agreement is a blow to Putin’s ongoing quest for restored great-power status.