Victoria Coates is a foreign policy analyst and art historian who contributed to The Weekly Standard in 2012, writing about Middle Eastern and international affairs including Russian-Israeli relations and the Syrian conflict. She later served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration and as a senior adviser at the Department of Energy.
Russian president Vladimir Putin made his second visit to Israel last week. His brief trip included high-level talks with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which they agreed at least in the abstract that Bashar al-Assad should stop slaughtering civilians in Syria and that the world…
In a grim footnote to the ongoing human tragedy in Syria, the country's cultural heritage as well as its civilian population is now in peril. Syria, a center of civilization in the ancient and medieval eras, boasts some of the finest archaeological sites in the near east, notably the old cities of…