Is a crisis brewing between the U.S. and Israel? On the one had, we have a new American president determined to make headway on the perennial presidential to-do item of forging Mideast peace, and on the other, we have a new Israeli prime minister who sees the divided Palestinians no longer viable as a peace […]
Longtime readers of this blog may remember that my very first post was devoted to a commemoration of the Berlin airlift as an enduring example of U.S. aid and assistance to other countries, even former enemies. As the calendar brings us around again to the anniversary of the airlift I’d like to call your attention […]
Thanks to the new relationship between the U.S. and Russia (after hitting the proverbial reset button) it would appear that progress in being made in nuclear non-proliferation talks. According to this report from the Reuters news service: Delegates meeting on the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty struck their first agreement on the anti-nuclear arms pact in a […]
Barack Obama soon will make his second overseas trip as President, visiting Egypt, Germany and France. Although Obama differs from his predecessors in many respects, some things are true of any Presidential visit to a foreign country. The people at the White House who plan the trip want to set a theme, they want a […]
As the U.S.-Afghanistan-Pakistan presidential summit concludes it’s worth noting that we have heard a lot of talk about fighting the Taliban, fighting corruption, increasing aid for development, and promoting trade between the two countries, but there is one important issue that has not been discussed at the summit: the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The […]
Today is AfPak Day at the White House as President Obama hosts the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is hoped that the summit will lead to new resolve to combat the Taliban and a new spirit of cooperation at the regional level. I’d like to refer you to this White House blog post in […]
Take a look at this video report from MSNBC about a new tactic the U.S. is using to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. The U.S. is attempting to interrupt the flow of money to the Taliban by burning the poppy fields. There’s no doubt that in a traditional war this would make sense: attack the […]
Friday was an important day in U.S. domestic politics. Supreme Court Justice David Souter informed the White House that he would be stepping down when the court term ends in June. This provides an opportunity for President Obama to appoint a new justice who will shape the direction of the high court for years to […]
The media has been saturated with 100 day retrospectives and most of them (understandably so) have focused on economic policy and the financial crisis. I found this analysis focused on foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace website. In A Thousand Envoys Bloom, Carnegie scholar David Rothkopf compares and contrasts the economic and foreign […]
In this post to the progressive site Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer examines Obama’s first 100 days of foreign policy with a reference to Twitter (practically unavoidable these days) inspired brevity: The score for foreign policy isn’t so clear-cut. In TwitterWorld, the temptation is to evaluate change on the basis of headlines and rhetorical […]
The Great Decisions Television Series is highlighting Egypt, one of the U.S.’s strongest allies in the Middle East. In the episode From Pharaohs to Facebook: Egypt Today, they talk to a wide variety of commentators about life in modern Egypt: Thirty years after the historic Camp David Peace Accords, Great Decisions traveled to Cairo for […]
Secretary Clinton warned yesterday that Pakistan is in danger of abdicating to the Taliban by giving up too much territory. They are becoming, she said, a mortal threat to world peace. The government of Pakistan then sent troops in to a region recently controlled by the Taliban, where they were then attacked by Taliban forces. […]
Representatives of several leading Western countries walked out of a U.N. conference on racism in Switzerland yesterday when the president of Iran continued the same vitriol leveled at Israel at the previous conference. This report from The Washington Post has the details on the proceedings: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued before a U.N. anti-racism conference […]
I was skimming the Huffington Post this morning and found this interesting blog post by Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute, promoting a new era of American public diplomacy. In light of my recent post about Web 2.0 efforts in this area, I was struck by this comment: In today’s interdependent world, where […]
I’d like to take a moment to highlight a resource from the Council on Foreign Relations that will be useful background info as you read about Obama’s trip to Mexico prior to attending the Summit of the Americas. The CFR offers a three-part timeline of the history of U.S.-Mexico relations from Mexican independence to the […]