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The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

Author: James M. Dorsey

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Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa.
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James M. Dorsey discusses on Radio Islam International the enormous challenges Syria confronts in the wake of the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad.
US and Israeli responses to President Bashar al-Assad’s fall offer a masterclass on how to discourage change in Syria. Rather than test and encourage Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, US and Israeli actions seem designed to box him in and potentially set him up for failure.
Syrian rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, appears to be a man who picks his battles.
Policymakers in Tehran and Moscow are asking who lost Syria in a tectonic rewrite of the Middle East’s geopolitical map that has ousted President Bashar al-Assad ‘s principal backers struggling to limit their losses.
Saudi Arabia has been awarded the men's 2034 World Cup. It will be the crowning event in the kingdom’s sport spending spree, having already reportedly invested USD6.3 billion since 2021, as it tries to diversify away from oil. James M. Dorsey discusses FIFA’s awarding of the World Cup to Saudi Arabia with Steve Lai on the BBC.
Saudi Arabia has been awarded the men's 2034 World Cup. It will be the crowning event in its sport spending spree, having already reportedly invested £5bn since 2021, as it tries to diversify away from oil. Niall Paterson is joined by Sky News' Rob Harris and Middle East football expert James M Dorsey to discuss what it means for football and the kingdom. The plans are not lacking in ambition and include a new stadium 350m above ground level, in an as-yet unbuilt futuristic carless city. But big questions remain about how the country landed the cup, with its bid unopposed and the country consistently facing claims of human rights abuses
Ahmed al Shara, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, would like you to think he is a changed man.
On this edition of Parallax Views, Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria as the country's rebels have taken over the capital, Damascus. Assad has been President of Syria since 2000. His toppling at the hands of Syrian rebels, most notably Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, represents a historic moment both for Syria, which has been ravaged by a civil war since March 2011, and the wider Middle East. What does this mean for all the various players in the region such as Iran, Turkey, the U.S., Russia, the Kurds, Islamic State, and, perhaps most importantly, Syria itself? In order to answer some of these questions, journalist, scholar, and frequent Parallax Views guest James M. Dorsey returned to the program to unpack this historic moment. We'll discuss the potential scenarios for Syria's future, the question of HTS and its relationship to ultra-conservative Sunni Islam, jihadism, the winners and losers in this moment of Syria's history, the Syrian Civil War, Obama's record in Syria, U.S. President-elect Trump's comments that the U.S. should not get involved in Syria going forward, and much, much more!
“If Assad doesn’t have a force that’s willing to stand up for him, what are the Russians and Iranians going to do?” Dr. James Dorsey explains on the John Fredericks Show how the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria is a significant blow to Russia and Iran’s presence in the region.
Syrian rebels know what they want. Having captured two of Syria’s four largest cities, Aleppo and Hama, the insurgents are gunning for Homs, the country’s third largest urban center, and then the capital Damascus. That is what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would want if it doesn’t significantly accept Turkish apple carts In Washington, Moscow, and Tehran.
A week into a rebel offensive, Syria is the potential fulcrum of a tectonic reordering of Middle Eastern geopolitics with President Bashar al-Assad as a key player. That is if Mr. Al-Assad is willing to play ball this time around.
Gulf leaders told Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati what they said to Palestinians when he asked the region’s wealthy energy exporters to fund the reconstruction of areas devastated by Israel’s war machine: “We will not pour money into a black hole. Call us when you have put your house in order.."
Major General Avi Bluth, the head of Israel’s Central Command, switched roles this weekend. Suddenly, Mr. Bluth, in occupied Hebron to protect Israeli worshippers and settlers during a controversial annual pilgrimage, was not the guardian of vigilante youth but their target.
Israeli commander’s West Bank woes spotlight a military tied up in knots by James M. Dorsey
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s world just shrunk considerably.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, elevated to new heights the symbiotic relationship between hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Their actions helped one another sabotage compromise resolutions of their perennial dispute.
Appalled by Israel’s carpet bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, US President Ronald Reagan didn’t mince his words with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin. “I was angry. I told him it had to stop, or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off,” Mr. Reagan noted in his diary. The August 1982 phone call between Messrs. Reagan and Begin provides a template for the United States’ ability to twist Israel’s arm and the limits of America’s influence.
Gaza is gearing up to be a war on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s watch that he doesn’t want but may be unable to end.
Predicting President Donald J. Trump’s Middle East policy and his attitude toward Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu amounts to reading tea leaves. The leaves are the cast of characters included in Mr. Trump’s administration when he takes office and who he excluded. Yet even that could prove to be misleading.
Israel may soon return tens of thousands of evacuees to their homes along the border with Lebanon, with or without a ceasefire with Hezbollah. The return of the evacuees would allow Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to tout a significant success in his 13-month-long war in Gaza and Lebanon, even if it may be short-lived without a ceasefire, if not in an equitable negotiated resolution of Israel’s disputes with Lebanon and the Palestinians.
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