Robert S. Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and Yale University, was U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014. President Trump’s Dec. 23 tweet promising a “slow and highly coordinated” withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria may ease the gnashing of teeth among officials and analysts in Washington, but it won’t end the criticism of his decision. That is precisely why the president should view the hullabaloo that erupted after he announced the Syrian pullout as an opportunity to take a number of steps to make the most of his essentially correct, but widely unpopular, move. Many observers have asserted that the withdrawal gives victory in…

A recurring theme of foreign-policy commentary since 2016 has been the prior status and uncertain future of the so-called liberal order. Some writers question whether a liberal order ever existed or challenge its alleged virtues, while others are quick to defend its past achievements and bemoan its potential demise. If there is a consensus among these various commentators, however, it is that U.S. President Donald Trump poses a particular threat to the U.S.-led, rules-based order that has supposedly been in place since 1945. If only Hillary Clinton had become president, some believe, the United States would have remained the “indispensable nation” guiding the world toward a more benign future, and the familiar…

A LIttle more than a week ago, the drumbeat of news concerning Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder was briefly interrupted by an extraordinary video coming from Oman’s state news agency. The footage showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being greeted by and meeting with Sultan Qaboos bin Said at his palace in Muscat. Contact between the Israelis and the countries of the Persian Gulf has taken place for some time, and the Omanis have been particularly “forward-leaning,” as they say in Washington—then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visited Muscat in late 1994, when peace between Israelis and Palestinians seemed like a real…

The answer is a conditional yes, but it will be very, very difficult, given the scope of the current situation, and most Americans will have to pull together to accomplish this. The problem “We the People” now face is essentially the same that was faced by our Founding Fathers when they were oppressed and tyrannized by King George and England. One major difference now however is that our leadership has been compromised, bought, blackmailed or murdered, leaving us without any George Washington, Ben Franklin, or John Adams type individuals. But if the economy crashes as a fair number of economists…

On Saturday morning, Zari, a 42-year-old homemaker, was in a food market in Shiraz, Iran. She was going about her daily investigation into ever-changing prices on basic goods and trying to figure out how to make her money stretch to buy the groceries she needed to feed her three teenage sons. She came home having spent the same amount as the week before but with a far lighter bag of food. As she angrily rearranged her groceries in her kitchen, she called her sister. It wasn’t long before she was cursing the government for its mismanagement of the economy, which…