MER Article The Closing of the Arabian Frontier and the Future of Saudi-American Relations In 1893, the University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner traveled to the Chicago world’s fair to deliver the most famous paper in the annals of the US historical profession. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” turned “the fact of conquest” into the myth of pioneers settling Robert Vitalis • 20 min read
MER Article Oil, Gas and the Future of Arab Gulf Countries The political and economic structures of the Arab Gulf countries have been surprisingly resistant to change. The resilience of the “old political deal” between royal families and traditional elites -- the ‘ulama’, tribal leaders, urban merchants and technocrats -- can be attributed to three main factors. First, the institutional, tribal Fareed Mohamedi • 11 min read
MER Article The Taliban, the Shari'a and the Pipeline Underlying the appearance of the Taliban movement, first of all, are factors internal to Afghan society, in particular the discrediting of the government and the “commandos” born out of the resistance to Soviet intervention. The rapid expansion of the militia, culminating with the conquest of Kabul Olivier Roy • 8 min read
MER Article Gun Belt in the Beltway On August 22 and 23, 1993, Saudi Arabia’s finances received rare front-page coverage in the New York Times, inaugurating a period of hand wringing inside the Beltway and among the academy’s consulting class over the kingdom’s future. This is a tradition going back decades, to the 1940s, when the Sau Robert Vitalis • 3 min read
MER Article The Most Obscure Dictatorship The camera avoids faces, except those of the plainclothes police. The black-and-white images are hazy, jumpy. They evoke the antiquated style of negatives that have escaped the censor and customs searches. “This could be any country,” says the commentator -- Chile under Gen. Pinochet, or Burma under Alain Gresh • 16 min read
MER Article Column: Globalization and Its Discontents “Globalization” is currently fashionable among privileged quarters of American society. It stands as the umbrella term for contemporary trends in culture, production, finance, marketing, technology, consumption, ideas, values and institutions that are variously celebrated, denounced, dissected and d Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article The Saudis, the French and the Embargo The successful maintenance of a near total embargo on Iraq owes to a number of factors, ranging from geography to post-Cold War global economies. Iraq’s limited access to the sea can be easily monitored, while its record of regional aggression has deprived Baghdad of local friends. Despite some brea Roger Diwan, Fareed Mohamedi • 6 min read
MER Article Pride and Prejudice in Saudi Arabia Ahmad and Fatima Abdallah (not their real names) are an Arab professional couple who worked in Saudi Arabia for four years in the 1980s. They discussed their impressions with a Middle East Report editor in September 1993. Coming from elsewhere in the Arab world, what were your first impressions of (Author not identified) • 7 min read
MER Article The Saudi Economy: A Few Years Yet Until Doomsday The word seems to be getting around: Saudi Arabia confronts a set of uncomfortable and unwelcome economic choices that will affect the royal family’s relations with its own citizen-subjects and with its big power allies in the West. For the past two decades, the kingdom’s treasury has served Fareed Mohamedi • 10 min read
MER Article Politics and Media in the Arab World Hisham Milhem is the Washington correspondent of the Beirut daily al-Safir. Born in Lebanon, Milhem has lived and worked in Washington since 1976. Joe Stork and Sally Ethelston spoke with him in Washington in September 1992. What are the salient features of the power structure of the Arab media? Wh Sally Ethelston, Joe Stork • 10 min read
MER Article State and Bourgeoisie in the Persian Gulf It is a widely held myth that Gulf businessmen accumulated their fabulous wealth by using traditional commercial acumen and guile refined over generations. Undoubtedly in a few cases this is true, but most businessmen in the modern, post-oil Gulf made their money less glamorously. For some, the vehicle was land Fareed Mohamedi • 8 min read
MER Article Scuds versus Butter Contrary to the common wisdom in Washington, most Arabs are poor, rational and interested in arms control. Declining oil prices, rising population, economic mismanagement and foreign policy adventurism have wreaked havoc with the economies of the Middle East, while local arms races have steadily raised the price of providing for Yahya Sadowski • 34 min read
