Column Archive

With just six weeks left until Egyptians go to the polls, the race for the presidency has entered a new level of acrimony, intrigue and speculation. The biggest shock came Sunday, when the country’s most powerful political organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, blatantly broke its promise not to seek the presidency. Its newly announced candidate, Khairat el-Shater, automatically took the lead in the campaign for the top job. El-Shater, the Brotherhood’s main financier, top strategist and deputy supreme leader, announced he was giving up his position in order to start campaigning for president. With that, he became the front-runner in a […]

Since at least 2003, Americans have overestimated our influence in Iraq. Although the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime paved the way for both a bloody civil war and a new form of government, the key actors in Iraq were and remain the Iraqi people themselves. Most recently, GOP critics of the Obama administration have been quick to fault the White House for withdrawing U.S. troops at the end of 2011. But the incessant, myopic focus of many Republicans on America’s military means is wrong-headed and ignores where the administration has actually fallen short in Iraq. The […]

One issue left unresolved by last week’s Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul is how to integrate the summits with several similar initiatives. Like the summits, these other mechanisms have emerged to respond to a new threat not anticipated by the architects of the original nuclear nonproliferation regime, that of nuclear terrorism. The unprecedented geopolitical and technological developments of the past two decades have enabled terrorist groups and other violent nonstate actors, sometimes supported by state sponsors, to exploit illicit trafficking networks to acquire dangerous nuclear technologies and materials. The process of globalization has also meant that countries lacking adequate nuclear […]

Given this administration’s resurging plans for regional missile defense schemes in both Europe and Asia, President Barack Obama’s recent open-mike admission to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have more freedom in his national security decision-making once he wins re-election is not a comforting thought. For a guy who promises “a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama seems awfully intent on incentivizing both Russia and China to field some more. With regard to Europe, America’s case for even limited missile defense is weak. We are told it is all about Iran and has nothing to do with Russia. But if […]