Accompanied by eight cabinet ministers, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a landmark visit to Baghdad on April 23, marking his first trip to the Iraqi capital in nearly 13 years. Erdogan’s meetings aimed at engaging all key stakeholders in Iraq. He held separate meetings with Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid, Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani, and Sunni leaders. Erdogan also made a stopover in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region, to meet Kurdish leaders. In their discussions, Ankara and Baghdad appear to have agreed to exclude contentious issues from their agenda ..read more

The recent unprecedented direct exchange of fire between Iran and Israel has revealed the relative military weaknesses of Iran. While most of Iran’s drones and ballistic and cruise missiles were intercepted by Israel’s multilayered air defense system as well as the U.S. and Jordanian militaries, Israeli missiles managed to penetrate Iranian airspace, successfully targeting a radar installation in Isfahan province in central Iran. Furthermore, from Iran’s perspective, the Israeli response could have been far harsher had it not been for the United States’ restraint on Prime Minister Benjamin Net ..read more

Diversifying the economy away from oil is one of the key goals of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 program. Data from 2022 indicated that progress was being made toward a more diversified economy. Similarly, developments in exports, output, government revenue, and employment show that, across most metrics, further progress was made during 2023, although oil is still the dominant force in the Saudi economy. Diversification Continued in 2023 The simplest way to track progress with diversification is to look at a time series of the relevant variables and see if they are moving in a direction consistent ..read more

The soft yet poignant sounds of harmonized humming emanate from the Saudi pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. They are the voices of around 1,000 women from the kingdom chanting in unison coupled with “singing sand dunes,” or the sound of wind whistling through Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter recorded by Manal AlDowayan. The artist staged three workshops with the women in Saudi Arabia for her exhibition, “Shifting Sands: A Battle Song,” which was curated by an all-female team for the Venice Biennale. The biennale opened April 20 and runs until November 24. It was curated by the Brazilian Adrian ..read more

The Israeli military is believed to have carried out strikes against a target in Isfahan, central Iran, on April 19. This action was reportedly in retaliation for Iran’s April 13 missile and drone attack against Israel, which itself was in response to Israel’s April 1 targeting of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria. While these exchanges of attacks and counterattacks have the potential to escalate and engulf the entire Middle East region in conflict, they did not escalate further. Encouraged by the United States, both Israel and Iran exercised restraint and may even glean lessons in prud ..read more

Central bank transparency focuses on the flow and accessibility of information so the public and markets are informed in an accurate, timely manner about the decisions made to achieve a central bank’s goals and the broader economic and financial developments that shaped such decision making. Transparency matters because it increases the trust of the public and markets, thereby making policy announcements more credible and policy decisions more predictable and more effective as a result of more accurate expectations by well-informed expectations of economic agents. The currencies of Gulf Arab s ..read more

Results of the March 31 nationwide local elections in Turkey represent the first true defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) since its 2001 founding. Although the previous local elections, in 2019, were widely interpreted as a defeat for Erdogan, as the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) opposition won five of Turkey’s six largest cities – including the two major prizes, Istanbul and national capital Ankara – AKP actually won the elections by most measures: provincial capital mayoralties, provincial assemblies, and village councils as well as overa ..read more

In February, Jordanian forces killed five smugglers attempting to bring the drug Captagon over the Syria-Jordan border, shining a spotlight on the often overlooked consequences of the Captagon trade across the Middle East. While the humanitarian crises that long-running conflicts in the Middle East have produced tend to make the headlines, less documented is the persistent rise in drug trafficking in the region and its far-reaching consequences across borders. One key trend has been the rise in Captagon production and trafficking in recent years, which has its roots in the Syria conflict. In t ..read more

As tensions flared in the Middle East in the beginning of the year over the ongoing war in Gaza, India increased outreach across the region. In January, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar visited Tehran amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran as well as a brief military standoff between Iran and Pakistan. In February, Jaishankar met Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, emphasizing India’s commitment to a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In February, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugu ..read more

On February 19, the European Union launched a new maritime security operation, EU Naval Force Operation Aspides, in response to escalating Houthi attacks on Western warships and merchant vessels in the Red Sea basin and northwestern Indian Ocean. The name Aspides, which means “shields” in Greek, denotes the operation’s underlying defensive nature. The EU naval mission, carried out under its Common Security and Defense Policy, underscores how ensuring maritime security and maintaining the stability of global supply chains are front and center in the EU’s defense and trade strategic calculus. Th ..read more