Greg Myre

The past year has been a bleak one in global affairs: The relentless carnage in Syria. Russia's annexation of Crimea. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Is there anything to applaud?

The coordinated international pressure on Iran, which has led to detailed negotiations on the country's nuclear program, was one ...

With a deadline looming Wednesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cobbled together a new coalition government that gives him the bare minimum of parliamentary seats needed to govern, according to news reports.

The deal assures Netanyahu of a fourth term as prime minister, but it is not the ...

When a major earthquake pummeled Kobe, Japan, in 1995, more than 6,000 people were killed, many buried as their traditional wooden homes collapsed under the weight of heavy, unstable tile roofs.

The quake's power was extraordinary and demonstrated Japan wasn't as prepared as it thought it was. Still, it was ...

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has a much better relationship with the U.S. than his predecessor. But he's still struggling to entrench his position in Iraq and defeat the Islamic State.

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, who had joined al-Qaida after his release, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, the group said in a statement Tuesday.

Ibrahim al-Rubaish had fought in Afghanistan before being arrested and held in Guantanamo. He would go on to be one of the ...

The president is trying to persuade Republicans and other skeptics to support the nuclear framework agreement with Iran. But he may have harmed his own cause.

President Obama is lobbying hard for a full-fledged nuclear deal with Iran. He hopes to raise the U.S. flag at an embassy in Cuba before he leaves office. He traveled to Myanmar last fall as he moves to normalize relations.

Obama's tenure has been marked by this outreach ...

The Iranian nuclear negotiations have focused on one very big and specific question: Will a deal make it harder for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon?

But the talks are also part of President Obama's much broader quest to repair the fractured relations between the U.S. and Iran, one defined ...

During a tough Israeli election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to antagonize, among others, the White House, Israel's Arab citizens and the Palestinians.

Now that Netanyahu's Likud Party has come out on top, the prime minister has sought to ease tensions with a series of gestures.

The latest ...

Yemen's downward spiral toward civil war is a disaster for the poorest country in the Arab world and adds one more member to the growing list of Middle East states that have imploded in the past several years.

But how important is Yemen to the wider world?

One argument holds ...

During his campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu aggressively opposed the negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, ruled out a Palestinian state on his watch, and argued that Israel would be best served by a government of the right.

If Netanyahu now cobbles together the coalition government he wants, his fourth term as Israel's ...

In the spring of 1948, Arthur Vandenberg was a powerful Republican senator from Michigan with ambitions of unseating a vulnerable Democratic president, Harry Truman, in November of that year.

Vandenberg had considerable influence as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a moment when the U.S. was reordering a ...

Since first becoming prime minister in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu has hammered away at Iran's nuclear program, calling it the greatest threat to Israel. Yet Tuesday's speech to Congress, like many before it, sharply criticized the international response to Iran while offering relatively little as an alternative.

As a ...

A new pan-Arab television channel, Al-Arab, began broadcasting Sunday afternoon from the Gulf nation of Bahrain. By dawn Monday, it was off the air.

"Broadcast stopped for technical and administrative reasons. We will be back soon, inshallah [God willing]," the news channel wrote Monday on its Twitter feed.

Al-Arab's apparent ...

Even in the best of times, it's hard to tell if anyone is in control of Yemen.

It's a particularly pressing question Tuesday amid reports that Shiite Houthi rebels have seized the presidential palace in the poor, unstable nation at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Some government ...

Plenty of world leaders have condemned the deadly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and a fair number took part in a rally held Sunday in Paris.

But as is always the case, it's much easier to condemn actions abroad than critically examine one's record at home.

"On ...

When Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for the killing of British writer Salman Rushdie, many in the West could scarcely believe a literary novel would prompt an international death threat.

We've come a long way since then.

Radical Islamists now issue threats against ...

When a 2011 firebombing destroyed the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, editor Stephane Charbonnier said the publication would not shy away from taking jabs at radical Islam.

"If we can poke fun at everything in France, if we can talk about anything in France apart from Islam ...

The flood of Syrian refugees has been straining Lebanon for several years, and the Lebanese have now responded by imposing visa restrictions on Syria for the first time ever.

Residents from the neighboring Arab states have traditionally been able to travel back and forth easily despite relations that have often ...

Wars raged in the Middle East and beyond. Economic woes stretched across continents. Crashing oil prices boosted some countries and slammed others. World leaders had a lot on their plate this past year. They were responsible for some of their trouble, and some of it just happened to them.

Whether ...