Israel

Iran’s nuclear programme is the most likely source of a major global conflict. So it is highly significant that the outgoing head of Mossad recently told the Israeli parliament that technical problems meant that Iran might not be able to make a bomb until 2015. These technical problems have, as a riveting piece in the New York Times explains, being caused by a computer virus. The stuxnet (correction) virus is in wide global circulation but it only kicks in when it spots the pattern that is used for centrifuges making highly-enriched uranium. When it does, it makes the centrifuges spin so fast that they destroy themselves. This virus appears to

The latest cache of Wikileaks has done America no end of good. The Saudis urged the US to bomb Iran – a sign that the Arab world can make common cause with the States and Israel. It has also emerged that North Korea has sold the Iranians long range rockets – Moscow, Berlin and Istanbul are all within the Ayatollah’s range. But the most important revelation is that China has tired of North Korea’s lunatic machinations, recognising that the rogue state is an impediment to global and regional security. China is also convinced that the country will not survive Kim Jung-il’s death and favours a union of the two Koreas,

Reading the British press – or even listening to some ministers – you would be forgiven for thinking that the only obstacle preventing Middle East peace is Israeli obstinacy and Benjamin Netanyahu’s unwillingness to force his political allies – like Shas – to the negotiating table. But, as always, things are a bit more complicated than the newspaper headlines would suggest. From Israel’s position, the region is looking increasingly hostile. Talk of a war in Lebanon with Hezbollah persists. In Syria, President Assad looks less interested in a rapprochement than he has done for years. Turkey is now closer than at anytime to declaring Israel an enemy – military-to-military links

Two years into her term, and after carefully avoiding any success-free issues, Hillary Clinton has finally launched herself into the Middle East peace process. According to Roger Cohen in the New York Times, “The heavy lifting is now in Clinton’s hands”. As evidence of Clinton’s new role, Cohen lists a video conference with the Palestinian prime minister, where the US secretary of state announced $150 million in US aid to the Palestinian Authority and said the Obama administration was “deeply disappointed” by recent Israeli behaviour. Mrs Clinton’s foray into the Middle Eastern quagmire  is interesting. It shows that the Obama administration is not going to give up and will, despite

It was as if we’d been transported back a week – here was William Hague talking about ‘hard-headed foreign policy’, the very phrase that David Miliband had used before he swanned-off into the wilderness in a floral shirt. The details of the two speeches had much in common – an emphasis on free trade, a promise to garner new strategic and economic partnerships in South America and the Near East, balance in the Israeli and Palestinian dispute, global solutions to climate change and a promise to export human rights. Hague differed in not mentioning liberal interventionism and laying historical and partisan claim to free trade, arguing that the European Commission’s

The Iran issue has dropped down the news agenda in recent months. But that doesn’t mean it has gone away. Even with the difficulties that Iran’s nuclear programme has faced, any decision on whether to try to use force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear-ready power will have to be taken in the next year or so as Jeffrey Goldberg’s brilliantly reported cover piece in the Atlantic reminds us. Goldberg writes, “I have interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials. In most of these interviews, I have asked a simple question: what is the percentage chance