Clear Gold

The real wild card for political and social unrest in the Middle East over the next 20 years is not war, terrorism, or revolution—it is water. Conventional security threats dominate public debate and government thinking, but water is the true game-changer in Middle Eastern politics.

Scholarly work on water has often focused on shared rivers as a potential cause of war between countries. But countries in the Middle East have not gone to war over their rivers, and diplomats have been successfu...