A post last month argued that President Obama was fast approaching a defining moment for his foreign policy in view of the mounting evidence that the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria used sarin, a lethal nerve gas, in violation of Mr. Obama’s numerous warnings …
Eric Trager on the Muslim Brotherhood’s view
of Iran and Iran’s foreign policy
Eric Trager is the Next Generation Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is an expert on Egyptian politics and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Dr. Trager …
The gesture itself was subtle, but as the collection of briefing notes were set to one side, so with it went a thin layer of pulped political barricade. What remained were two government leaders seated across a table, a Russian president asking a British prime minister to state his case. …
I like to write my own blogs, and too often have too much to say to readers who want it short and sweet. But the push to attribute past and future attacks on U.S. citizens on U.S. to “self-radicalization” is the kind of linguistic legerdemain too sweet not to invite …
In January 1864, some strangely dressed men with odd accents arrived in the camp of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose troops had been reeling from shortages of arms and supplies. They demonstrate a new weapon – an amazingly high powered accurate “repeater” rifle – and offer it to Lee.
He …
The internet went dark in Syria last week. Although media reports blamed the outage on a fault in optical fiber cables many in the tech community were skeptical. After all, it’s not the first time Syria shut down the internet in …
Each week the editors at FPA choose five must reads from around the web and five of the best of ForeignPolicyBlogs.com
With nearly 70,000 dead Syrians since the beginning of the unrest, the Syrian conflict certainly join a select group of international massacres. At this path Samathan Power will have enough facts and material in order to write volume two of “A problem from Hell” looking at the ghosts of Syria. …
“Kennan believed that language helped make policy and that vague, expansive language would lead to vague, expansive policy,” writes author Nicholas Thompson in a 2012 Foreign Affairs article about Cold War strategist George Kennan.
As the humanitarian situation in Syria gets even worse, as questions over the use of chemical …
The rapidly escalating conflict in Syria is raising the collective volume of voices asking, “What can and should President Obama do in Syria?” The reality is that Syria’s future is inextricably tied to the future stability of the entire MENA region. Today, I turn to Cassie Chesley, …
Frederic Hof on Syria’s Weight on Iran’s Security Interests
Ambassador Frederic C. Hof is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. In 2012 Ambassador Hof was tasked by President Obama to head the …
By Sarwar Kashmeri
United States’ intelligence agencies and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are still not certain the Syrian government of President Assad has used chemical weapons against its opposition. Nothing has yet emerged from France, Germany or Britain to unequivocally confirm this charge either. But the clamor …
A defining moment for Mr. Obama’s foreign policy legacy is fast approaching
From the Levant and the Persian Gulf to the Korean peninsula, events in recent weeks have offered a clinic in the difficulty of enforcing red lines on rogue regimes and their weapons of mass destruction, as well as how …
There is a good rule taught in newsrooms early in one’s reporting life that goes along the lines of why one should listen to so-called crazy people. It is because, sometimes, they actually say the truth.
By dint of luck or perhaps true insight, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has stumbled into …
By now, most people have come to the realization that the global economic order is under the unrepentant control of neoliberal institutions. Not to conflate neoliberalism with capitalism, but suffice to say both philosophies share the same goal: privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization, all in the …
