Abstract

Iran and six major world powers clinched an agreement on Nov. 24 that they hailed as a major breakthrough in years-long efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In Egypt, the military in July overthrew Mohammed Morsi’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government, which had been democratically elected a year earlier, shaking a region still awash in post-Arab Spring turmoil. In Syria, where the death toll from the country’s three-year civil war topped 100,000, last-minute Russian intervention in September halted a U.S. and French move to intervene militarily after a chemical weapons attack killed up to 1,400 people, mostly civilians. In Ukraine, the Russian-speaking region of Crimea voted on March 16 to secede and join Russia, and two days later Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty to annex the peninsula on the Black Sea. The crisis was triggered by the fall of Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych following months of protests against his efforts to favor Moscow over the West.

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