On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced that Susan Rice would replace Tom Donilon as national security adviser and nominated Samantha Power to replace Rice as ambassador to the United Nations. The New York Times called the two women “outspoken voices for humanitarian intervention,” noting how they had joined forces with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to persuade Obama to back the NATO-led Libya intervention. But despite their interventionist reputations, Rice and Power will implement the agenda of the president, explained Mark Jacobson, who is senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and also serves as [...]
In a May 23 speech at the National Defense University, President Barack Obama announced a shift in U.S. national security strategy. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, he noted, the United States “went to war.” After 12 years, al-Qaida has been decimated. Those of its leaders still alive spend more effort hiding than plotting new attacks. The American homeland “is more secure,” the president said. And the United States had ended or is ending large-scale military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism still threatens, Obama argued, but the nature of the threat has changed [...]
At this weekend’s Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual International Institute of Strategic Studies Asia Security Summit in Singapore, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered a well-crafted speech that reaffirmed the core tenets of the Obama administration’s Asia Pivot and showed how the Pentagon was still executing the strategy despite budgetary constraints and the departure from the administration of some of the strategy’s key architects. Yet the reactions to the speech from the senior Asian defense officials present made clear that the pivot continues to face serious obstacles. Hagel underscored the United States’ enduring security ties with the Asia-Pacific region in [...]
