Perhaps because there was so much to digest in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s review of the Obama administration’s foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on Wednesday, her olive branch to Europe has been largely overlooked. Yet some members of her distinguished audience did a double take when she said, “President Obama and I have reached out to strengthen both our bilateral and multilateral ties in Europe. And the post-Lisbon EU is developing an expanded global role and our relationship is growing and changing as a result. . . .. There is no doubt that a [...]
I mentioned in my first post back from vacation that the U.S. should be focusing its foreign policy attention on Africa in the “post-Iraq” era. The reasons why remained inchoate and intuitive, untilNikolas Gvosdev, in his WPR column today, helped me bring them into focus when he wrote: Beyond Latin America, the [U.S. should] explore ways to bind Western and Southern Africa closer to the United States. . . . Washington should pay more attention to surrounding the United States with a “ring of friends” to its south, rather than thinking of our security as guaranteed by the oceans to [...]
I got an e-mail a while back from a reader who mentioned that he loved our Global Insider items, adding that they’re always highly informative even if the subjects are a bit “random.” I agreed with the former observation, but not with the latter. And a news item that I expect will garner a bit of attention over the coming days will help explain the method behind the apparent madness. We usually pick the GI topics from items on our Leading Indicators channel, based on whether we feel like it warrants closer attention due to its significance or its likelihood [...]
