U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Even while U.S. troops are still disengaging from combat in Afghanistan, the American military is hard at work distilling lessons from its long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns of the past decade. Two new counterinsurgency doctrine manuals—a joint one released last November and an updated Army/Marine Corps publication that will hit the streets in the next few days—provide a window into what lessons the military drew from Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet both are also important for what they do not or cannot address. Military doctrine institutionalizes the recent experience of the armed forces and identifies “best practices” for future operations. That the […]

With six months until the U.S. midterm elections, it’s time for planning, panic or musing, depending on where you sit, about how they will affect U.S. foreign policy. Democratic Party bravado about retaking the House of Representatives is gone. Instead, the topical question has now become, Will the GOP take back the Senate, and if so, then what? On domestic policy, the “Then what?” question has been framed as an either-or: Will GOP senators, especially the presidential hopefuls among them, want to run in 2016 on achievements, which, for immigration or tax reform, require cooperation with the White House? Or […]

President Barack Obama’s delayed visit to East Asia—finally carried out this month after domestic politics forced him to skip key summits last fall—was supposed to highlight America’s seriousness about rebalancing its foreign policy attention to the Asia-Pacific region. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, spoiled the narrative, as the ongoing crisis in Ukraine continues to suck up most of the oxygen of the U.S. foreign policy process. Unlike earlier Obama peregrinations overseas, this trip did not generate blockbuster headlines or do much to burnish U.S. global leadership. Some pundits are already writing off the entire “pivot” to Asia as a failed […]

“Russia, whatever they’re doing right now, is not the Soviet Union,” said Washington Democratic Rep. Adam Smith yesterday at a discussion of the U.S. defense budget. Although most of his congressional colleagues would likely agree with that statement, there is no consensus on Capitol Hill about how to respond to a crisis in Ukraine that appears to leave the United States with few options. And while the differences in large part follow party lines, internal divisions within each camp have also surfaced. Democrats appear to generally support, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the Obama administration’s approach of gradually increasing pressure […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama today amid escalating tensions in Ukraine and lingering mistrust over NSA spying revelations. In an email interview, Sudha David-Wilp, senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, explained where the two countries’ interests overlap, and where they diverge. WPR: How closely do the U.S. and Germany’s political and economic interests converge—within Europe, in the trans-Atlantic context and globally—and where do they diverge? Sudha David-Wilp: Germany and the U.S. refer to the trans-Atlantic partnership as one steeped in common values. Under that broad justification for working […]