My colleague Dr. Greg Austin and I wrote a short discussion paper titled “Cybersecurity: Crime Prevention or Warfare?” for the 49th Munich Security Conference which took place this February in Munich, Germany. We identified some of the top challenges pertaining to cybersecurity and outlined six policy action ideas. Given the recent revelations about the Chinese […]
From a global perspective, any new entry into the “nuclear club” is high undesirable as such: With every new entrant, there is an exponential increase in the political complexity of achieving total nuclear disarmament — or, to put it more simply, there is an additional obstacle in the way of eliminating all weapons of […]
Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Congress the other week brought the country’s attention back to the Benghazi attack of Sept. 11, 2012. It is a topic that I find fascinating, less for what it says about U.S. foreign policy than for what it says about domestic politics and the processes of perception and interpretation. In this […]
Judging by the budget gridlock the answer seems to be no. As mentioned in my last blog, I spent last week in San Diego attending West 2013, a Navy/ Marine focused conference co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute. The conference theme was: Pivot to the Pacific What Are the Practical & Global […]
Departing Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s farewell letter is not the usual five paragraphs consisting of gradiose claims and bromides for the ages. At more than 3,750 words, it is the length of a college term paper or a magazine feature article. As interesting for what it leaves unsaid as for what it says, it says […]
This film is riveting. It is a fictional look at the hunt for and eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, the man who is believed to have masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. Jessica Chastain rightfully won the best actress in a drama at the Golden Globes. She has also […]
Nearly nine years ago, Senator Hagel charted out “A Republican Foreign Policy” in the July/August 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs. Hagel summarized this foreign policy with seven principles: 1) Leadership in the Global Economy: “The rule of law, property rights, advances in science and technology, and large increases in worker productivity all have contributed […]
With the retirement of Senator Jon Kyl and defeat of Senator Richard Lugar — of the unprecedented Nunn-Lugar initiative — Congress’s 113th session will see a significant lacunae in arms control and nuclear nonproliferation expertise. While I am hard-pressed to call Kyl an “expert” — someone who repeatedly questioned the expertise of people with far […]
Shifting red lines in Syria undermines the tough rhetoric toward Tehran Many observers have connected the civil war raging in Syria to the broader U.S. standoff with Iran. Critics of the Obama administration’s extremely cautious approach on Syria argue that pushing more forcefully for the demise of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Tehran’s main ally in the […]
With the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and the transition from the first to second Obama term, it’s a time for pundits to compile to-do lists. For example, fellow blogger Jodi Lieberman recently circulated an excellent one from the NTI Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which emphasizes the Middle East nuclear-free-zone talks, the upcoming U.S. […]
Almost a month after the reelection of Barack Obama at the presidency of the U.S., its implications on the EU-U.S. relations should be reviewed. In a conference organized by the EU Center of Excellence at the University of Miami counting the French Consul to Miami, Gaël de Maisonneuve, Jean Monnet Chair Jaoquin Roy, Ambassador Ambler […]
After Iran, arguably the most urgent problem in nuclear nonproliferation policy is Japan’s huge and growing stockpile of separated plutonium, its plans to start commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels next year,* and the bad precedent that will set for South Korea, South Africa and other near-nuclear-weapons capable nations. Anybody concerned with this issue and […]
In his most recent, and to my mind, revealing examination of the evolution of the IAEA safeguards regime, Carnegie Senior Associate Mark Hibbs lays out some critical issues facing the evolution of the Agency’s central nuclear watchdog function. What he finds is a swirling morass of political jockeying, an ongoing struggle by an agency struggling […]
In terms of establishing the conditions for a world without weapons of mass destruction (the main theme of this blog), we might as well say frankly that Obama’s first term left a good deal to be desired. Despite the clear commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons the Obama made both as candidate in 2008 […]
Tomorrow is election day — and the end of the deluge of political adverts — so I thought readers would find a recent piece at Global Security Newswire useful. Lee Michael Katz, writing for the Global Security Newswire, surveyed a number of arms control advisors and former administration types regarding the Obama Administration and […]