At a Ground Zero ceremony to honor the anniversary of 9/11, Obama asserted that, as Americans, “We are not, and never will be, at war with Islam.”

Recent indications suggest that Turkey’s foreign policy leanings are shifting away from the West to more rogue nations. It is critical that the US and EU work to keep the alliance of Turkey, by offering it incentives, to maintain the stability of the region.

Yemen faces a range of internal problems that hamper its own ability to fight Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. The US Government must focus its efforts on uniting the Yemenis and augmenting its cooperation with Yemeni military and intelligence agencies.

A renewed global effort against terrorism is too important, complex and costly to be waged in secret. We need political openness and a serious, comprehensive evaluation of whether this strategy is most prudent for the nation on the whole.

A US blockade would strengthen the sanctions regime against Iran while demonstrating that the United States would be willing to move beyond negotiations and diplomacy if necessary. A similar gambit worked against Cuba and may have prevented a Soviet-American WWIII; perhaps now such an intermediate move could resolve this current crisis.

In a seemingly unending war, President Obama has chosen to replace General McChrystal with General David Petraeus as head of the US troops in Afghanistan. His political and diplomatic abilities will greatly complement his military skills as we move forward in Afghanistan.

The challenge for Palestinians will be to resist the atmosphere of frustration and violence in order to maintain the nonviolent resistance movement for as long as it will take to see results. And Israel must find a way to protect its national security without itself sparking violence.

The key to successfully driving al-Qaeda out of Yemen is not to continue attacking its strongholds. The means of finding a lasting solution for Yemen is to help stabilize the government, which would allow it to deal with the local faction of al-Qaeda on its own.

While current regional alignments in the Middle East may seem to be set in stone, they in fact may undergo dramatic and unexpected shifts as the strategic environment on the ground fluctuates. Therefore, when US policy makers confront Yemen and the Middle East as a whole, they must strive to remain a step ahead of the game, drawing lessons from the North Yemeni Civil War about the mutability and ever-changing nature of alliances and hostilities in the region.

The Afghan government must reach the point where it can negotiate with a Taliban that is very much defeated and that will remain so—lest popular unrest, Pakistani (or al-Qaeda) support, or some combination thereof subvert the progress that has been so costly in blood and treasure.