Jeffrey Goldberg

Iranian President Hassan Rohani — who this week is attempting to charm the pants off the United Nations, President Barack Obama, world Jewry and Charlie Rose — may succeed in convincing many people that the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t actually want to gain control of a nuclear arsenal. Why Rohani would […]

Two quick notes on two interested parties in the rolling Syria situation. First, what to make of Russia’s intentions? I’ve been deeply skeptical, for the obvious reason that Russia is Russia, a weak country whose foreign policy revolves around sticking it to the U.S. The op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by Russian President […]

Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that the U.S. might postpone a military strike on Syria if the regime put its chemical weapons under international supervision — an offer that both Russia and Syria quickly warmed to. So, in order to obviate an attack on a country that Americans evidently care about not at […]

For the first time in the unfolding Syria crisis (okay, maybe for the third time), I feel as if we’ve definitively slipped down the rabbit hole. Last night, Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, tweeted the following: “Former NSA Steve Hadley: ‘I believe the only way we’re going to get a good outcome […]

Over the past two days or so, the Syria interventionists (a group that includes yours truly, at least some of the time) have argued with great fervor that President Barack Obama’s proposed missile strike would be meant as a message not only to the Bashar al-Assad regime, but to its masters in Tehran. The argument […]

So what exactly is the most telegraphed missile strike in history meant to achieve? Such a strike — now in the works at the White House — clearly isn’t meant to speed regime change in Syria, where the government killed more than 1,300 people using chemical weapons last week, according to opposition groups. There’s no […]

Yesterday morning, President Barack Obama condemned the Egyptian military’s slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers, and canceled joint military exercises scheduled for next month. He said that the violence should stop and that “a process of national reconciliation should begin.” What the White House fails to understand is that the Egyptian military has very […]

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace mission to the Middle East is semi-quixotic, if not wholly quixotic. I doubt he’ll reach his goal of negotiating a final-status agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The two sides haven’t even agreed yet to the topics they’ll discuss in negotiations. But we should give Kerry this: […]

It seems as if al-Qaeda, or its Arabian Peninsula branch, has succeeded in terrorizing the United States of America again, but this time without – as of this writing – detonating an ounce of C4. It doesn’t strike me as a wise idea to preemptively shutter 21 different American embassies across the Middle East and […]

Finally, a reason to believe that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s energetic intervention in the Israeli-Arab dispute might work: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran (I can never get over the fact that this is his actual title) is a bit worried — so worried that he, or one of his fundamentalist […]