Aqeel Ahmad

  UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT: THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I IN THE MIDDLE EAST           Watching the ongoing refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, I cannot but recall the suffering of Middle Eastern people at another time of great upheaval: during the First World War and following its settlement.      The history of the Great War helps us to understand how the violent past is responsible for the current turmoil in the Middle East. Historians have covered the destruction caused by the First World War in Europe extensively, but many in the West do not realize the level of destruction and upheaval it caused in the Middle East. The losses in the Middle East were staggering: the war not only ravaged the land and decimated armies, but it also destroyed whole societies and economies. In this way, the experience of World War I in the Middle East is perhaps more akin to the experience of World War II in Europe. The social, economic, and p...

                              The middle East is a transcontinental area located primarily in western Asia. And it also connects to some of the parts of the African and European continent. The western borders connect to the Mediterranean Sea where Israel, Lebanon, and Syria rest opposite from Greece and Italy in Europe. The Red and Arabian Seas surround the southern part of the center East. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman border these waters, with Iraq and Jordan connecting them to the western part of the region. In the middle of the center, East rests the Persian Gulf, cutting into the region and giving it its hook-like shape. Countries along the Persian Gulf include the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iran. The Middle East is also called, "land of the seven seas." The world's three biggest religions originated in The Middle East, Judaism, Christianity, and...

  West Asia and the Arab world since 1919 Outline: 1          Middle East: Strategic importance, geography and history Turkey: 2          Downfall of Ottoman Empire during WWI 3          Turkish war of independence 4          Mustafa Kemal reforms 5          Cyprus problem 6          Turkey and Pakistan Egypt: 7          Egyptian Nationalism after WWI 8          Free officer’s movement, Coup d’état 9          Suez War 10        1967 Arab Israeli war 11        1973 Arab Israeli war 12...

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION      In May 1998, India and Pakistan engaged in a series of nuclear tests, raising  the possibility of escalation in the pace of nuclear proliferation around the  world. Nuclear proliferation refers to the spread of nuclear weapons to states that did not possess them prior to 1968, when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation  Treaty (NPT) was signed. Until the Indian and Pakistani nuclear detonations, international efforts to arrest the spread of nuclear arms in the 1990s  seemed to be enjoying some success. The rate of nuclear proliferation appeared to be slowing down, the geographic scope of proliferation was  shrinking, and de-nuclearisation was achieved in 1996 in parts of the former Soviet Union. Three post- Soviet states with nuclear weapons left on their  territory – Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine – cooperated in the removal of those weapons to Russia and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear-w...

By Aqeel Ahmad   Foreign Policy: What Now   George Washington's Farewell Address in 1789 contained one major piece of advice to the country regarding relations with other nations: "avoid entangling alliances." Those words shaped United States foreign policy for more than a century. Today some Americans think that Washington's words are still wise ones, and that the United States should withdraw from world affairs whenever possible. In truth, however, the United States has been embroiled in world politics throughout the 20th century, and as a result, foreign policy takes up a great deal of the government's time, energy, and money. If isolationism has become outdated, what kind of foreign policy does the United States follow? In the years after World War II, the United States was guided generally by containment — the policy of keeping communism from spreading beyond the countries already under its influence. The policy applied to a world divided by the Cold War,...

  The fundamental notion of deterrence is simple: it involves persuading someone to stop from doing something they don't want to do by presenting him with the possibility that doing so would result in consequences for him that exceed the benefits of the activity. This idea has gained traction. this concept in the administration of human interactions has always had a role to play. For a variety of reasons, the term "deterrence" gained special prominence in the nuclear context in the years following WWII. Nuclear weapons had a unique ability to display the prospect of disadvantage, and deep mistrust between East and West, based at least in Western minds on perceptions of a massively armed adversary with alien ideology and perhaps expansionist proclivity, generated fears that intolerable actions would be taken sooner or later unless this prospect was exploited. The technical growth of military capacity, as typified by nuclear weapons, convinced most people that the desire to...