So there’s now officially a debate on the right about the idea of lawfare. One side says: the U.S. is in danger because its weaker enemies are using international law to undermine its objectives. The other side says: there’s nothing to worry about because international law, and even domestic law, is fairly impotent when it […]
Been off the blogging sphere recently because of travel; now that I’m back home in Colorado thought I would give my thoughts on the Libyan situation. As I write this, according to press reports, anti-government forces are in control of most of the eastern portion of Libya, to include a large segment of the oil […]
It is very easy to think you understand what it is the IAEA, or, as it is called in so many media stories, the “UN Nuclear Watchdog”, can actually do to detect a covert nuclear weapons program or the diversion of nuclear material. You envision IAEA safeguards inspectors busting down doors like nuclear superheroes, pointing […]
Here are two radical proposals for Afghanistan. Neither of them has yet been attempted by the United States. They are: engage in counterinsurgency and attempt to make peace deals with the Taliban. As I’ve noted before (here, here, and here), though there’s a lot of talk of counterinsurgency, the current NATO effort does not very […]
Early this morning (2-25-11), Mexican gunmen armed with short rifles and driving trucks equipped with strobe lights, and in one case, missing license plates, once more attempted to box in a US government-owned vehicle (OGV) driven by US anti-drug agents a short distance from the US border on the Mexican side.
One of the Mexican gunmen in the lead vehicle was also, according to reports, wearing a badge around his neck. . .
It’s hard to throw a virtual rock nowadays at any foreign affairs publication and not find statements of the demise or fall of American power. In many ways, these are accurate statements as American economic power is falling in proportion to some of the rising economies around the world (although it is still top dog […]
Though the ultimate outcome of Egypt’s revolution remains uncertain (it’s still possible that it might wind up not being a revolution at all), it is worth asking: what factors make security forces more likely to decide to side with protesters? Michael Auslin flirts with this question in relation to China at the National Review. He […]
News of Iran’s intensified global search for uranium supplies has hit the wires, underscoring the need for the IAEA to get its nuclear fuel bank up and running. The Agency received the final green light it needed when its Board of Governors approved a proposal by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) to establish a bank […]
This is my maiden post for the Foreign Policy Association, so I thought I’d briefly introduce myself and share some thoughts about what I hope to accomplish with my blog posts for FPA. I have served in various capacities in and around the Washington, D.C. policy community over the last twenty years or so, where […]
There’s been a story brewing for a couple weeks about a lawsuit against Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster, who published Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The plaintiffs in this $5 million lawsuit claim that the book should not be classified as non-fiction because they dispute some of the Carter’s assertions. As Kevin Jon […]
Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk predicts that the IAEA is preparing to refer the Syria situation to the UN Security Council. The situation has been strange since it began in September 2007, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria. The initial Syrian response was to denounce the Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty […]
The sequence of events that occurred on February 15th and ended in the murder of ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and in the shooting of Special Agent Victor Avila are as follows–evidence that the attack on two US federal agents was premeditated and planned, not a case of ‘being in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ or an incident triggered by the desire of the assailants to hijack a valuable vehicle.
President Obama has promised Zapata’s family that the US government will spare no effort to bring the Mexican gunman responsible for the attack to justice, and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, has express outrage, declaring “The full resources of our department are at the disposal of our Mexican partners in this investigation.”
Given the dearth of substantive press coverage on both side of the border, and the muted attitude of US officials toward Mexico’s efforts to curb drug trafficking and cartel violence over the past five years—during which roughly 38,000 people have been killed, including scores of US citizens—the vocalization of even these stylized objections is noteworthy.
In my first post about Egypt, I noted the view articulated by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, that in revolutions, the members of the army and/or the police force are the ones who decide what happens. If the government loses control of its coercive forces, the revolution succeeds. So the question we, and […]
True, the Mubarak regime was authoritarian and at times brutal with its domestic opponents; true, Mubarak squandered opportunities over three decades to gradually introduce pluralism and democracy. But, compared to other such regimes, was it so bad, especially from the American perspective? Why were Western governments so eager to topple him, yet still tiptoe around the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his […]