Gregg Carlstrom

1 month ago | unsettledsources.blog | Gregg Carlstrom

In 2016, nine years and a lifetime ago, I met in Gaza with Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the founders of Hamas. At one point in our interview he tried to explain why Hamas saw its control of Gaza as an achievement—even though, by that point, its control had brought three wars and almost a decade of Israeli and Egyptian siege. In the West Bank, he said, Palestinians had to endure the daily abuses of Israeli occupation: checkpoints, home demolitions, deadly raids.

1 month ago | unsettledsources.blog | Gregg Carlstrom

“Which America will show up?”I’ve heard that phrase a lot over the past decade. It’s a lament about the state of America’s policies in the Middle East, which seem to turn on a dime every four years. At a conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, one speaker said it from the stage; several others asked it in private conversations. Donald Trump seems to have upended America’s approach to the region, much as Joe Biden did four years earlier.

2 months ago | unsettledsources.blog | Gregg Carlstrom

I had planned to write about something else today, but that seems a bit pointless when the whole world is talking about Trump’s tariffs. When it comes to trade with the US, the Middle East is a trivial player compared to Europe, Asia and North America. But the region offers a good example of how these tariffs are divorced from any real economic logic. Jordan signed a free-trade agreement (FTA) with America in 2000. It was the first Arab country to do so.

2 months ago | unsettledsources.blog | Gregg Carlstrom

"This [is] not about the Houthis." — Pete Hegseth, hours before America bombed the HouthisAn introductory note: This will be a home for periodic writing that is too long for Twitter and too niche or off-topic for my day job. Much of it will focus on the Middle East, but I hope to venture a bit further afield as well. By now we are almost a week into Signalgate, the Trump administration’s “who among us hasn’t accidentally added a journalist to a group chat full of classified attack plans” scandal.

Nov 20, 2024 | economist.com | Gregg Carlstrom

Ali Khamenei, Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump will determine whether the conflict continuesBy Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent, The Economist When the Gaza war began in late 2023 even some Israeli generals thought it would be finished within two or three months. Few observers thought it would drag on for more than a year. Fewer still predicted the swift decapitation of Hizbullah, the Shia militia based in Lebanon, or the back-and-forth bombardment between Iran and Israel.