North America Archive

More so than that of other countries, the foreign policy pursued by the Federal Republic of Germany displays deep historical fractures and discontinuities. This reflects the country’s profound identity crisis in the aftermath of the twin disasters of National Socialism and the Second World War. The failure of German hegemonism and power politics after 1870-71, culminating in the unique crimes of the National Socialist dictatorship, underscored the country’s need for a radical break with its old nationalist and militaristic past, and resulted in a renunciation of traditional power politics. Key features of German foreign policy since 1945 include a culture […]

Germany’s policy of engagement and partnership with Russia is rooted in the German experience within Europe. If economic interdependence and integration could transform Germany after both World War II and the Cold War, so German thinking goes, then it might also transform Russia. Nevertheless, nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, Germany’s efforts — as well as those of Europe and the U.S. — to transform and integrate Russia have failed. Over the past decade, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has forcefully rejected integration with the West, predicating its desire for a return to great power status on expanded […]

Last week I gave a plenary address to the Joint Warfighting Conference 2009 — the annual East Coast naval extravaganza co-sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). This mega-conference opened my eyes to just how much things have changed inside our naval forces thanks to the ongoing long war against violent extremism. To give you an idea of the ground covered, I have to take you back almost 17 years. That’s when the Department of the Navy came out with its post-Cold War strategic white paper entitled, “. . . From […]

Will President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court alter American foreign policy? It’s a question not many have bothered asking. Instead, the lion’s share of speculation about Obama’s pick has focused on the wealth of women candidates available and the hot-button domestic issues — like abortion, gay marriage and gun rights — likely to face the court in coming years. Obama himself explained early on that he is less interested in a candidate’s devotion to abstract legal theories and more in a justice who thinks about “[h]ow our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” Finally, the Supreme […]

Matt Stone takes a Stephen Walt idea and runs with it, coming up with what he calls “strategic sufficiency”: [O]nce we agree on an operationalprinciple or principles . . . wemust do exactly the minimum necessary to achieve a strategicallysufficient outcome; any outlay beyond the minimum necessary will onlyrob resources from other theaters where those resources could beemployed with a better marginal return on investment. This is an economist’s way of thinking about foreign policy: resourcesare scarce; therefore maximize the return on any resources we employ.”Resources” can be thought of as troops on the ground, brains in theWhite House, the […]

I’d like to flag this testimony by Daniel Hamilton (.pdf) to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on NATO’s strategic vision moving forward. It’s a nicely nuanced take on what is often portrayed — and here I include myself among the guilty — as an either/or affair. The strength of Hamilton’s approach is to distinguish between NATO’s “home” and “away” roles, then further distinguish between where it should lead, where it should support, and where it should selectively do one or the other on all of the core missions on both sides of the ledger (p. 3). That’s followed by […]

The world continues to hold its breath over a swine flu that, while perhaps slowing, is still likely to kill in the low hundreds and remains balanced on the edge of a true pandemic. Although only a mere 2-3,000 cases have — so far — been recorded worldwide (80 percent of them in co-sources Mexico and America), this variant of H1N1 influenza penetrated dozens of nations and all mass-populated regions of the globe in a matter of days — a truly humbling reminder of how globalization enhances mankind’s epidemiological interdependency. Has the media overreacted? It’s possible that round-the-clock coverage in […]

A newly issued U.S. Army field manual has put people on notice: Video games are serious training tools. In its first revision since 9/11, the U.S. Army field manual for Training and Full Spectrum Operations mentions gaming 32 times, describing it as as a key ingredient in replicating “an actual operational environment.” Released in December 2008, the new doctrine is another reminder of how gaming is rapidly redefining military recruitment and training. The push to use games as a recruiting tool dates back to 2002, when the Army released “America’s Army” — a free, downloadable video game that gave people […]

Have we really reached the end of American hegemony? For those who think so, the signs of America’s decline and the rise of emerging powers are everywhere. According to this line of argument, the world’s sole superpower succumbed to overstretch. U.S. failures in the “war on terror” revealed the limitations of American military power, while its role in provoking the global economic crisis revealed the shortcomings of American economic leadership. As a result, rising powers around the world feel suddenly emboldened by America’s visible weakness. Brazil’s president blames the worldwide recession on “white-skinned people with blue eyes,” and Russia and […]

In reading up on the recent violence in Iraq for a France 24 taping I did this morning (I’ll post the link when it goes live tomorrow), I found myself thinking that the Surge ultimately did achieve its second-stage objective of providing the space for political reconciliation. Not in Iraq, that is, but in the U.S. And that might turn out to be just as, if not more, important. Because the Iraqi political accomodation the Surge was meant to facilitate was the one aspect of the strategy that was entirely out of our hands. The Surge — and here I […]

I’ve been following recent developments in French-American relations with some concern, because after having correctly calculated that political advantage was to be had in “befriending” the toxic, late-term Bush administration, it increasingly seems like President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided the opposite is true with regards to the wildly popular, young Obama administration. So far, there are only behind-the-scenes whisperings to signal that France has once again passed into the “opposition,” in particular some post-London G-20 spin debunking the “Obama as savior” line pushed by the White House press team. But if Sarkozy’s “alignment” with Bush had everything to do with […]

This video of Conoleezza Rice has been getting quite some attention around the web. Before offering some quick remarks, I’d just like to say hat’s off to Michael Wilkerson, a WPR alum finishing up his Stanford degree, who as best as I can tell was the first person to get this. A few things jumped out at me about this. First, as Friday Lunch Club noted, the very ex-post-facto realpolitik take on foreign policy that Rice espouses with regard to Saudi Arabian human rights violations. Interesting that this realist pass is only extended to American friends, not adversaries. I’ve long […]

With many of the world’s navies engaged in anti-pirate patrols off the coastal waters of Somalia, it’s no surprise to find French, German and Spanish frigates among them. The frigates are there, though, not under their respective national commands, but rather under that of a joint EU naval force, whose mission is to protect World Food Program vessels delivering food aid to Somalia, as well as commercial and other vessels threatened by pirates in the Gulf of Aden. While EU NAVFOR Somalia is the EU’s first maritime operation, it is not its first military operation, whether in Africa or beyond. […]