Mehrdad Akhlaghi was appointed defense minister in October 2026 by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. He is an unusual choice, as, unlike most of his predecessors, he does not come from a uniformed ...

One striking thing about US President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week is how isolated he was in making this call. The Israeli Prime Minister has ...

Karen E. Young is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she leads the Economics and Energy Initiative. She is also a senior research scholar at the Columbia University Center on ...

Iulia Joja is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she focuses on European and Black Sea security, with particular attention to defense, strategic cultures, and transatlantic ...

The artificial intelligence (AI) era demands a fundamental rethinking of strategic infrastructure and international partnerships. Just as oil shaped the geopolitical landscape of the 20th century, ...

IMEC is designed to create a resilient supply chain network connecting South Asia (namely India), the Middle East, and Europe. It aims to transport goods, energy, and data, bypassing the Bab al-Mandab ...

This report assesses the future sustainability of agriculture across North Africa using a multidimensional approach that considers the dynamics of water, climate, land, and economics. To enable this ...

This individual is a guest contributor. MEI is not able to assist with contact requests. Kennedy Muslim is an Associate Researcher and Analyst at the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) and Indikator ...

As the U.S. administration considers whether to remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, understanding its nature, development, and ideology is essential to ...

The last few weeks in Iran have retaught us lessons we already knew — lessons written in blood, courage, denial, and cruelty. We were reminded that the clerical regime’s ineptitude in governing is ...

According to Nicholas Smith’s history of colonialism in the southern Red Sea, the port of Obock was acquired by the French in 1862 from the local ruler, the sultan of Tadjoura, and this was later ...

Several weeks ago, Saeed Mohammad’s name made the rounds as a possible candidate for Iran’s upcoming presidential election in June. Observers started looking into the past of the relatively unknown ...