This October, U.S. President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney will debate defense policy. That debate has the potential to be path-breaking: The national security strategy crafted immediately after Sept. 11, which led the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan, has now run its course, creating the opportunity to re-examine the very foundation of American strategy, including the reasons why the United States uses military power as well as the ways that it does so. More likely, though, the presidential debate will avoid big questions and gravitate toward immediate problems like Iran, Syria, North Korea and the size of […]

Why It Matters: U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan, nearly 11 years after they invaded. Why? The answer boils down to one word: al-Qaida. The goal is to damage the terrorist group enough to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks. Video News by NewsLook

In August 1944, representatives from China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States gathered at the Dumbarton Oaks mansion in Washington to lay the foundations of the postwar global governance architecture. Coinciding with the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, the meeting set the stage for many of the international and regional political, security and economic structures on which the global order has been based since 1945: the United Nations and subsequent multilateral organizations, as well as international agreements on trade, tariffs and currencies. Under the auspices of these arrangements, states were willing to cede some sovereignty […]

On Sept. 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, in an address before a joint session of Congress, outlined his vision of a “new world order,” arguing that the end of the Cold War and the imminent launching of a multilateral military operation to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces offered the nations of the world “a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation.” Events over the next several years seemed to validate his prediction: The ensuing First Gulf War offered a model for rules-based multilateral military interventions; the Madrid Peace conference raised the tantalizing hope that […]

The global economy is currently undergoing a quiet transformation. While most of the world’s attention remains justifiably focused on the European Union’s minute-by-minute struggle to formulate a permanent solution to its unending debt crisis, other far-reaching economic forces are shifting beneath the surface. Increasingly, it seems as if the golden era of globalization that defined the last quarter of the 20th century is in danger, with the years prior to the 2008 economic crisis perhaps marking its high-water mark. Ours has become the era of perpetual global financial crisis, of sagging economic growth, of stubborn unemployment. As the world economy […]

Pacific Rim leaders met Sunday for the last day of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Vladivostok, Russia. As reported by the Associated Press, the 21 APEC members pledged “to fend off the deepening damage from the European crisis and revive flagging growth in the region by supporting open trade, reforming their economies and strengthening public finances.” Alan Oxley, chairman of the national Australian APEC Study Center at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and managing director of ITS Global, told Trend Lines that, with Russia “keen to showcase its new free trade credentials following its recent accession to […]

It is common wisdom that foreign policy does not decide U.S. presidential elections, and few issues inspire less enthusiasm these days than a Europe stuck in a currency crisis that it seems unable to fix. Europeans are also very familiar with the growing American belief that Europe no longer matters at all in the global arena. As a result, few were expecting any emphasis on Europe or the European Union as one of America’s most steadfast strategic partners in President Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the Democratic Party convention last week. Still, Obama’s only reference to Europe came as a […]

President Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to stand for a second term last night in Charlotte, N.C. But by adhering to the traditional schedule for the party’s convention, he excluded the possibility of attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vladivostok, Russia. Obama declined the invitation to attend this year’s APEC conclave because he would not have been able to deliver his keynote address in time to fly out to Russia’s Far East for the meetings. But, ironically, a key reason for speaking in Charlotte — to personally address tens of thousands of party activists […]

Talk of a U.S. attack on Iran is like a late-summer thunderstorm that rumbles ominously in the distance without ever drifting further away. Few American observers advocate an immediate attack, but a growing number hint that the question is when, not if, a strike takes place. The distance from saber-rattling to war is narrowing. As is often the case in the prelude to war, the discussion has so far been informed more by passion than by analysis, stoked by popular distrust of the Iranian regime. As the United States found when contemplating the invasion of Iraq in 2002, such an […]

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