It is close to a decade that Iran’s controversial nuclear program has been at the forefront of foreign policy debates. The U.S. has considered an array of options such as threat of a military strike, diplomatic efforts and most recently tightened sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, the issue remains unresolved […]
Dr. Mahmoud Khattab is the Chairman of the Syrian American Alliance. The organization is one of five that make up the Coalition for a Democratic Syria. A Sacramento-based doctor of internal medicine and originally from Damascus, Dr. Khattab’s mission is to help Syrian refugees who have fled their chaos-stricken country. Involved with the Coalition for […]
Chinese construction companies are behind many of the new buildings going up in Yangon While in Yangon, Myanmar last month, I had a chance to talk with several Myanmarese who naturally asked me where I lived. When I told them I lived in China, what struck me most with their response was their anxiety over […]
The Foreign Policy Association has just released preliminarily results of its 2012 National Opinion Survey and there are some interesting tidbits in there regarding the Asia-Pacific. However, for all the dynamics that are unfolding in the region there is not a lot of debate in this survey on the importance of Asia to U.S. interests, […]
In 1971 Stafford Beer, a renowned British academic, proposed to make Chile the world’s first cybernetic country. In essence, this meant that Chile’s entire economy would be run by a centralized computer network; real time data from hundreds of public utilities, banks, and industrial manufacturers would be rendered into optimal allocations of electricity, automatically set […]
New America Foundation President Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker mid-week about the foreign policy topics overlooked by President Obama and Governor Romney during the final presidential debate. It was valuable to have one debate out of three focused on the U.S. role in the world. It was also inevitable that both candidates still […]
Carbon dioxide, black soot, and nuclear waste are all commonly discussed pollutants in the Arctic. The potential risk of contamination from oil spills is also another pollutant that receives a sizable amount of attention both in the media and in academia. Yet a new study in Marine Pollution Bulletin discusses a pollutant that is quite […]
The state of the U.S.-EU relationship is not on the list of topics considered in the recent National Opinion Ballot Report, but the responses in it still matter to Europe analysts. Poll answers on the issues of energy politics and the promotion and defense of democracy abroad may contain some insights into the immediate future […]
It’s that time of year again, the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) has released its “National Opinion Ballot Report” for 2012. The report presents the results of the FPA’s National Opinion Survey, in which 20,623 ballots were returned, the majority of these ballots emanating from Florida, California, New York, Colorado and Arizona. Needless to say, these […]
In the spring of 1966, a small group of students attending the Tsinghua University Middle School named themselves “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards” after signing two big-character posters criticizing the controversial play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The students interpreted the play as an allegory for Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward during the […]
In an otherwise contentious race for the U.S. presidency, free trade has been a surprising point of convergence for President Obama and Governor Romney. Specifically, Obama has emphasized the success of the free trade deals (FTAs) passed last year with Colombia, Korea and Panama, saying these¨…are helping us to double our exports and sell […]
There are several updates to the key points I outlined in last week’s post about President Obama’s handling of the Afghan war. The first concerns the success of the surge of 30,000 extra troops that Mr. Obama announced in December 2009, most of which were deployed in southern Afghanistan. As I noted, one of the significant […]
In an expert report released last week regarding the ongoing conflict in the North Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neighboring countries Rwanda and Uganda were both fingered as supporting the M23 rebel group, including implications that top officials of the Rwandan government actually issue the commands to the organization. The two top […]
On the eve of the third and final presidential debate dedicated to the U.S. foreign policy between President Obama and Governor Romney, it is appropriate time to get back to the common foreign policy of the EU and explore where it stands today. The Treaty of Lisbon introduces two important elements into the institutional architecture […]
There has been much talk this election season of Israel in general, and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu in particular, being injected into the American political system. It has recently come to light that this is actually a relationship that works in both directions. Fifty-eight percent of all money raised over the last two […]