U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Dating the commencement of the U.S. War in Afghanistan from the first entry of American troops into the country on Oct. 7, 2001, the war has now lasted longer than the failed Soviet effort of the 1980s. And at last weekend’s NATO summit, the U.S. government committed to continue fighting in Afghanistan at least through 2014, with one senior American official calling even that possible withdrawal date “aspirational.” Opponents of continuing the large-scale, American-led counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan cite the failure of the Soviet military to suppress the Afghan insurgency in the 1980s as evidence that the United States will […]

History tells us that, when a rising great power approaches the standing of the dominant system-shaping great power, conflict is inevitable, either directly or in such regions where their two spheres of influence intersect. The great counterexample is the acceptance by a “rising” America of the late-19th century of Great Britain’s implicit offer of a “special relationship,” which allowed the latter to punch above its weight throughout the 20th century. That alliance was subsequently forged in opposition to common enemies: first the Kaiser and then Nazi Germany, followed by the Soviet Union. China and the United States have no such […]

On the surface, the NATO summit meeting in Lisbon, the North Korean artillery barrage against Yeonpyeong island, and the unmasking of the “fake” Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour in Afghanistan would appear to be separate and unconnected events. But there is a common theme that ties these three news stories together. In his WPR column column on Monday, Thomas P.M. Barnett summed up the problem: The United States cannot “close the gaps” in the global security system. The end of the Cold War and the rise of new power centers around the world have not led to any appreciable shift in […]

At the NATO heads-of-state summit held in Lisbon this weekend, the leaders of NATO member states resolved some important issues regarding the alliance’s future, but they deferred many key decisions for further deliberation. As a result, much of the summit’s outcome will not be definitively clear for some time. The topic that drew the most media attention this past weekend was how long NATO would continue its military effort in Afghanistan, and whether the alliance could actually win the war within whatever withdrawal timeline its members articulated. NATO leaders confirmed 2014 as the new target date for drawing down their […]

NATO approved a new Strategic Concept in Lisbon on Nov. 19, the first reworking of the alliance’s mission statement since 1999. Although the document offers plenty of promises, the alliance seems to have overlooked a number of problems it faces in making good on them. First, the promises. The new Strategic Concept: – calls on the allies to develop their capacity to “prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber-attacks,” to protect “critical energy infrastructure” and to “maintain robust, mobile and deployable conventional forces to carry out . . . Article 5 responsibilities and the alliance’s expeditionary operations.”– reaffirms the […]

The global financial crisis was a true system perturbation, revealing the gap between widely perceived risk and actual underlying risk in the world’s increasingly integrated financial system. As with any such vertical shock, the resulting horizontal waves continue to be felt long after the initial blow. When gaps in capabilities and rule-sets were subsequently discovered, the world’s major economies effected changes, like shifting economic oversight from the G-7 to the expanded G-20 and updating the Basel banking accord. In a world without true global government, these surges of great-power cooperation constitute a critical reassurance function, letting us know that an […]

It is very likely that come the end of November, after a busy month traveling to Asia and Europe, President Barack Obama will have emerged with few decisive victories to burnish his image after the “shellacking” he took in the midterm elections. Instead, Obama and his team will have to adjust to some hard realities. Though the new Congress will not be seated until January 2011, we are already seeing changes in the political climate in Washington that will test the administration’s ability to show, both to Americans and to other governments, that the executive branch is still in the […]

Human rights were glaringly absent from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s agenda when she recently met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit ahead of Egypt’s Nov. 28 parliamentary elections. The silence is noteworthy, given Cairo’s suppression of the political opposition in advance of the elections as well as its overall dismal human rights record. The Obama administration fears that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will respond to criticism by withdrawing both political support for the stumbling Israeli-Palestinian peace process and logistical support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The administration is also concerned that criticism would boost […]

Since coming to office, the Obama administration has paid a great deal of attention to the Middle East. Somehow, however, the frequently turbulent country of Lebanon slid precipitously down the list of Washington’s most-urgent regional priorities. Among the other strategic projects on its regional to-do list, Washington was working to engage with Syria, bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table, improve relations with Muslims, impose sanctions on Iran, and end the war in Iraq. Lebanon, perhaps unsurprisingly, got short shrift, even though it has always played an outsized role in the region, serving as the stage where powerful players […]

Writing this week in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria argued that the United States needs to adopt a “hedge” strategy with regard to China, nudging the PRC toward assuming a cooperative, responsible role in the international order, while at the same time preparing for the possibility of an aggressive China bent on regional domination. Zakaria’s argument echoed language in both the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (.pdf) and the 2010 QDR (.pdf), which took ambiguous stances on the future U.S.-China relationship. Those documents similarly suggested that China faced a choice over whether to become a constructive member of the international community, […]

President Barack Obama’s itinerary this month — first to Asia, then to Europe — will follow a path that recalls the setting of the sun. For some people, that image is a metaphor for American power, itself seen as waning. The theme of American decline is a familiar one, of course. It resurfaces more or less with every election, and with every poll that asks whether the country is “headed in the right direction.” However, the evocation of direction suggests a more apt image for Obama’s journey: the two-headed eagle. It was once a common feature of imperial heraldry — […]

JUBA, Sudan — Almost a month ago, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Southern Sudan’s ruling party, convened all of the South’s registered political parties for a conference designed to promote Southern unity ahead of the region’s looming self-determination vote, scheduled for Jan. 9. The vast majority of Southern Sudanese favor secession, and politicians as well as everyday citizens seem to agree on the need for consensus during the South’s “Final Walk to Freedom,” as a billboard in the Southern capital of Juba calls the countdown to the referendum. However, despite the conference’s goal, persistent rifts among the South’s political […]

President Barack Obama won fans in New Delhi last week with his call for India to take a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. But while the president explicitly endorsed India as an “emerged” power, his declaration contained an implicit challenge as well. Obama said that he wanted the U.S. to work with India on an “efficient, effective, credible and legitimate” U.N. Though phrased as diplomatic rhetoric, these words raised important questions that India’s leaders must answer. Can India capture a permanent seat on the Security Council simply because of its growing economic leverage and military clout? Or should […]

Heading into the G-20 summit in Seoul last week, tensions were visibly high between the U.S. and China, the world’s top-two economies. Washington’s demands that China allow its currency, the yuan, to appreciate were met with criticisms from Beijing about the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy. At the heart of the argument lay global current account imbalances, largely a consequence of the sizeable U.S. trade deficit with China. By the close of the summit, the U.S. delegation succeeded in getting the Chinese to acknowledge that these imbalances were problematic for the global economy, but failed in getting them to do anything […]

By calling the Chinese out explicitly on their currency manipulation in his concluding address to the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama may have torpedoed his relationship with Beijing for the remainder of what China’s bosses most certainly now hope is his first and only term. Burdened by a Republican-controlled, Tea Party-infused House, and bathed in hypocrisy thanks to the Fed’s own, just-announced currency manipulation (aka, QE2), Obama seems not to recognize either the gravity of his nation’s long-term economic situation or the degree to which his own political fate now hinges on his administration’s increasingly stormy ties with […]

It is unfortunate that President Barack Obama’s visit to Asia as well as the G-20 summit in Seoul took place in the aftermath of what he himself termed a “shellacking” in the midterm elections — an electoral rebuke delivered in part because Americans believe that the Democrats have not delivered on their promises of economic security. The trip could have been used to project the message that the United States is prepared to take the lead in the global community of nations. As Secretary of State Clinton put it back in September, “[T]he United States can, must and will lead […]

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was sent to the Senate for consideration in May 2010, but its outlook is far from clear. To be ratified, the treaty mustachievetwo-thirds majorityapproval. But some treaty provisions, viewed by certain senators as restricting U.S. missile defense objectives, were already an obstacle to ratification six months ago. Even in its current configuration, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has demanded elimination of the treaty provisions related to missile defense and certain non-nuclear systems. Given Republican gains in the Senate following the midterm elections, these provisions will face even greater opposition come January. Removing […]