Based on the amount of news coverage, you may not have heard of it, but on July 7, 2017, the United Nations adopted the Nuclear Prohibition Treaty. The agreement bans the use of nuclear weapons, and the threat of their use, as well as their testing, development, possession, sharing, and stationing in other countries. The […]
A newspaper profile of the President’s foreign policy spokesman has created an uproar based on a distorted notion of the role of foreign policy messaging.
On Sunday, Pyongyang launched a long-range missile. While China still opposes expanding sanctions on North Korea, Washington has recently stressed its determination to support South Korea and Japan against the North’s nuclear threat.
The IAEA’s final report left many observers dissatisfied: reactions to it tended to reflect people’s preexisting attitudes toward the issue.
There has been considerable opposition to the Iran Deal. One of the most curious assertions being made, however, is that we cannot negotiate with the Iranians because they cannot be trusted. This simply defies logic. If we trusted them, we would not need to negotiate an agreement.
A great deal has been written about the agreement negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 countries. A lot of the commentary has been nonsense. Here I would like to address three unfounded lines of attack.
Regular readers of Foreign Policy Blogs may be familiar with the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Trevor Keck and Joe Gurowsky, for instance, have touched on the topic in earlier posts. Having been approved by the General Assembly after two decades of advocacy, the treaty will open for signature on June 3. It will go into […]
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has issued statements by High Commissioner Navi Pillay regarding the ongoing human rights crisis in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). While the system of oppression employed by the DPRK is manifest, it remains “one of the worst – but least understood and reported […]
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 […]
Following up on the controversial Guenther Grass poem discussed in a previous post, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine published last week a very long article addressing the question of whether the six sophisticated submarines Germany supplied Israel are being equipped with nuclear weapons. Co-reported and co-written by eight people, the very long article contains a lot […]
On Monday morning, Fox News ran a cover story— “ATF ‘Fast and Furious’ Claim SHOT FULL OF HOLES” (The caps belong to Fox). The visuals were pretty exciting, but the revelations in the article, hardly breaking news, were SHOT FULL OF SPIN. Listen. It’s time for the media and Congress, to get the story (the whole thing) right. We need more focus more on the criminality that may attend Fast and Furious and less discussion about the outrageous, but not illegal, aspects of the operation. More news and less
noise…
Let’s review.
Fox reporter William LaJeunesse (US Government Bought and Sold Weapons) tells us, first, that it was ‘taxpayer money’ (1.25 million—ok, sounds right) that paid for the military-grade weapons ATF sent across the US-Mexico border as part of Fast and Furious.
Where else would that money have come from? Do we think ATF agents in Phoenix passed the hat…