North America Archive

According to a recent article in Global Security Newswire, President Barack Obama might seek an international agreement to limit weapons in space, reversing Bush administration policy. As noted on the White House Web site, the new administration is calling for “a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.” The president’s position on this issue is impractical and dangerous. Proponents of the ban argue that because the U.S. has the most space-based assets to lose in a future space war, it also has the greatest interest in restricting the use of space to peaceful purposes. An international […]

Matt Eckel cruelly sums up most of the arguments I make here on the blog in four words: Makes sense in theory. . . . More particularly, he was responding to this post on U.S.-Russia cooperation on European missile defense, and the idea of a three-pillar security architecture for Europe. Here’s Matt: All this to say that if there’s going to be a comprehensive collectivesecurity arrangement between the U.S., Europe and Russia, there has tobe a comprehensive convergence of security interests. That doesn’t seemto exist right now. A better idea, from my perspective, would be totrade European missile defense for […]

SKOPJE, Macedonia — As unpleasant as it may be for Europe to hear, the stabilization of the Balkans during its painful transition in the 1990s was made possible by the United States. Although America initially stayed out of the conflicts that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the fighting ultimately stopped only after President Bill Clinton summoned the warring parties to Dayton in 1995. When Kosovo started looking like the next chapter in the region’s bloody history, it was again the U.S. that took decisive action, with Europe happy to support Washington’s lead. And finally, the U.S. made the final call […]

World Politics Review contributor Emil Sanamyan appeared yesterday on Russia Today to discuss the prospects for U.S.-Russian arms control talks, missile defense and Iran policy.

Since 1944, America’s position within the International Monetary Fund has given it tremendous influence over national and international financial markets. Increasingly, however, this influence has been met with resistance in some parts of the world, with America’s relative economic decline causing some to question its dominant role within the Fund. But the U.S. has been largely unwilling to relinquish its privileged position, or to dramatically change its stance on the benefits of unfettered markets. As a result, despite a recent resurgence in the face of the global financial crisis, the IMF is today facing a serious challenge to its status […]

For anyone who enters the site through the blog, I thought I’d call your attention to the latest WPR feature issue, The Changing Landscape of U.S. Intelligence. Its three articles examine the state of American intelligence after the Bush years, in terms of institutional reform (Richard Weitz here), collection techniques (Mark Lowenthal here), and the past and future of intelligence politicization (Jason Vest here). Definitely worth reading if you’d like to get a sense of the intelligence agenda for the Obama administration moving forward.

The changes to the U.S. intelligence community after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States were perhaps the most comprehensive in five decades. Intelligence reformers have sought to improve integration within the community as well as strengthen the intelligence tools at its disposal. Although the reforms achieved important progress in some areas, certain pre-9/11 difficulties have persisted while new ones have arisen. Restructuring The Executive Branch: The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act The greatest influence in shaping the contours of recent intelligence reform in the United States was the 9/11 Commission (officially the National Commission on Terrorist […]

“There is a thin line between the right and duty to formulate a policy based on subjective political values, and the conscious or unconscious temptation to abuse or ignore the intelligence process. It is one thing for a statesman to listen carefully to his intelligence advisers, then make a decision counter to their best judgment; and another for him to wield his political strength and authority in the interest of receiving only that information which conforms to his preconceived ideas and political biases. . . . It has been suggested that the unresolvable tension between policymaking and intelligence rests in […]

Collection is one of the essential activities in intelligence. Not only does it involve some of the most daring and technically adept aspects of intelligence, it is also a major part of the United States intelligence budget. It even forms the basis for the security classification system, with classification of intelligence stemming from the harm that would be done to U.S. national security if the means by which intelligence is obtained were revealed. Much of the intelligence collection system that the United States developed over many decades was dictated by two factors: the nature of the Soviet state and the […]