U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

President Barack Obama is under increasing public pressure to alter his strategy on Iran. Instead of diplomatic engagement with the current regime to end the nuclear stand-off, many feel he should encourage its collapse — or at least its fundamental modification — at the hands of the Green Movement. According to this line of reasoning, it makes no sense for Washington to negotiate with a government that might be on the verge of being overthrown altogether. The risk of the alternative approach, of course, is that Iran might cross the nuclear finish line before the regime has been forced to […]

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — With all eyes on London and the high-profile Afghanistan Conference, a quieter gathering that took place this week in Prague might have shed more light on the opportunities, challenges and uncertainty that lie ahead for the war-torn country. The conference, co-sponsored by the Prague Security Studies Institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, brought together military and civilian practitioners of reconstruction and development work in Afghanistan, ostensibly to discuss the future of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. But the wide-ranging panel discussions also addressed the broader challenges of reconstruction, as well as the urgent need for overcoming […]

DENPASAR, Indonesia — Under the leadership of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, U.S.-Indonesia ties have progressively strengthened since he first took office in 2004. Yudhoyono earned a masters degree in the U.S. and has never hidden his liking for the States. So it came as no surprise when, in November 2008, the former general-turned-president called for a U.S.-Indonesia strategic partnership, later renamed a comprehensive partnership. The move was in turn welcomed by U.S. President Barack Obama, who himself is sentimentally attached to the archipelagic nation where he spent a part of his childhood. Soon after Obama’s inauguration, U.S. Secretary of State […]

For the last month, Washington has been abuzz with talk about what the United States government should do about Yemen. Should the U.S. give Ye­men more military aid? Should it begin a large-scale economic assistance pro­gram? Should it help Yemen establish a governmental reform program, help implement a de-radicalization program, or boost special forces training? Yemen is a weak and poor nation, and the United States is a strong and wealthy one. With the right package of assistance, most assume, we can work together on shared goals. The reality is messier than that, though. From a Yemeni perspective, the common […]

The long war between Israel and the Palestinians is not the root cause of all conflicts between Islam and the West, but it exacerbates every such conflict. From Northern Europe through North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and down to Australia, there are violent opponents of “the West” motivated, in part, by indignation at the sufferings of the Palestinians. Various solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been proposed — the “Jordanian option” (or “no state” solution), the “one state” solution (i.e., a single multicultural state), and so on. But for the present, at least, the […]

In a WPR blog post earlier this week, Judah Grunstein described the “Yemen frenzy” induced by the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing plot as a post-9/11, “Pavlovian response.” But there’s more to the conditioned behavior than just the push for a massive, whole-of-government intervention in a country linked to an attempted domestic terrorist attack, and in which al-Qaida has a presence. A second factor at play is the tendency of the U.S. government — and indeed, of the entire political establishment — to dart from crisis to crisis, pouring time, treasure and resources into responding to the headlines of the […]

JERUSALEM — The Obama administration is working hard to correct the missteps it made in the opening phases of its attempt to mediate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The principal challenge now is persuading the Palestinian side to return to the negotiating table. This challenge emerged, ironically, as the direct result of Washington’s early errors in its quest for peace. The administration is learning from its mistakes and better understanding the nuances of this complicated conflict. And yet, its propensity to make counterproductive moves persists. A recent statement by the U.S. negotiator George Mitchell showed just how easy it […]

Just 12 days into 2010, Chinese government representatives have already made more than a half-dozen official statements warning the Obama administration against selling additional weapons to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may respond in several ways to the announced sales, with the freezing of Sino-American military relations likely to be one means of retaliation. The Obama administration should accept a temporary suspension to educate Chinese policymakers that the defense dialogue is not something that Beijing can employ as a source of leverage over Washington. The immediate catalyst for Beijing’s anger came on Dec. 23, when the Defense Department […]

A year ago, Christian Brose penned a provocative article for Foreign Policy entitled “George W. Obama.” In it, the former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice asserted that “Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term” during the 2008 election, rather than the Bush foreign policy of the second term. Moreover, of the latter, he predicted that Obama would “largely continue it.” In large measure, Brose has turned out to be right. Despite the rhetoric of “change we can believe in,” there has been a high degree of continuity between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Take the most […]

Last month, the West officially lost the new “Great Game.” The 20-year competition for natural resources and influence in Central Asia between the United States (supported by the European Union), Russia and China has, for now, come to an end, with the outcome in favor of the latter two. Western defeat was already becoming clear with the slow progress of the Nabucco pipeline and the strategic reorientation of some Central Asian republics toward Russia and China. Two recent events, however, confirmed it. On Dec. 14, Chinese President Hu Jintao and the heads of state of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan personally […]

President Barack Obama tried his best to avoid it, but the moment has now arrived when he has no choice but to impose new sanctions on Iran. The challenge now is to find the formula that will prove effective in pressuring the regime without undermining Iranian protesters who have risked their lives to demand change. Obama’s commitment to use diplomacy in dealing with Iran became a cornerstone of the foreign policy approach he constructed during his presidential campaign. He vowed to use fair-minded negotiations, a respectful tone, and reasonable arguments to convince the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium in […]

Political pundits across America seem committed to the notion that our just-concluded decade deserves the moniker “worst ever,” with the formulations ranging from Time’s demonic “decade from hell” to Paul Krugman’s self-flagellating “Big Zero.” But if Krugman could call it “a decade in which nothing good happened,” much of the planet might find our myopic bitterness a bit much — as if the entire world should stop spinning just because the Dow Jones Industrial Average forgot to exit the decade higher than when it entered. Why are we so convinced that the last 10 years, the decade of the Naughts, […]

During the holiday season, pundits traditionally pen their “end of year” assessments of a presidential administration. Some even assign a grade, as if foreign policy can be reduced to a kind of schoolwork assignment. But instead of grading the performance of the president and his team over the past year, I’d rather take a look at the environment in which his administration must operate after the New Year. And for President Barack Obama, 2010 is going to be a challenging year indeed. First, Obama can no longer offer himself the breathing room represented by “policy reviews” used to assess what […]