U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

The saga of Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing this past week, is still unfolding. Yet the Obama administration appears to have encountered its own version of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Hungary 1956” moment: the point at which idealistic rhetoric about U.S. support for freedom and democracy collides with the harsh realities of U.S. national interests. As long as Chen was detained in internal exile in the village of Dongshigu, he was an out-of-sight martyr for whom rhetorical support could easily be expressed without too much risk of damaging the larger Sino-American […]

Last week’s inaugural U.S.-Brazilian Defense Cooperation Dialogue was the latest example of the Obama administration’s efforts to enhance defense cooperation with Brazil. Though improving broader relations with Brazil has been a priority for the Obama administration, the U.S. emphasis on bilateral defense ties should also be seen as part of Washington’s ongoing effort to get Brazil to increase its global security profile as the U.S. focuses more of its strategic attention and shrinking defense resources on the Western Pacific. Even before announcing the U.S. pivot to Asia last fall, the Obama administration had actively pursued expanded security ties with Brazil. […]

A few weeks ago, I met a friend from Damascus for coffee. He had just arrived from Syria a few weeks earlier, and I was curious to hear how he was adjusting to life in the United States. We had been talking for about half an hour when our conversation turned back to what my friend had left behind in Syria. And as my neighbors walked by our local coffeeshop en route home from work on a lovely spring day in Washington, my friend related to me in graphic detail how, last summer, he had been arrested, detained and repeatedly […]