The split within Iraq’s three-million strong Turkmen minority will test Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi’s intelligence and ingenuity as the complex and internecine conflict underway in Nineveh Province surrounding Mosul continues.

Amidst global convulsions, one affected group remains relatively powerless and largely ignored: Middle Eastern Christians.

The point is not that one nation-state attacked another. It is precisely that the Caliphate attacked one of the cities in… let’s call it the Cosmopolis, the collection of cities that are the capitals of what was once Christendom.

Speaking last Friday CSIS, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter warned that military excellence is not America’s “birthright”. It must be earned again and again.

As the battle for Mosul gets underway, a new consensus is emerging about what should come next: The creation of a safe haven for Iraq’s three largest minority groups in the northern part of the country.

We know that Mosul must fall for IS to collapse; we also know that the battle for Mosul will be a bloody one. Yet the greatest danger will come after Mosul falls.

This article about how U.S. foreign policy could build relations with Sunni tribes first appeared in Issue 2 (Winter 2016)…

In the shadow cast by 9/11, it was difficult to believe something could be worse than al-Qaeda 1.0. But with American nightclubs and office buildings awash in blood, with Europe under siege, with Christians and Yazidis targeted for extermination, with the Pandora’s Box of chemical warfare reopened, with the female populations of entire cities enslaved, here we are.

The Obama administration is making some adjustments to its foreign policy approach, but not enough to deal with the challenges we face.