The poll numbers are undeniable. Disillusioned by Afghanistan and Iraq, focused on domestic concerns, Americans increasingly want their nation to reduce its global footprint and stop trying to solve the problems of others. A cautious, poll-driven President Obama responds predictably, defining America’s global interests more narrowly and eschewing calls to address humanitarian horror, protect human rights and advance freedom far from home.
It’s hard not to notice that the Obama administration’s foreign policy is on the skids. Increasingly, the critiques leveled at the administration from both left and right share a common theme: that U.S. foreign policy has become characterized by strategic drift, with serious consequences for American interests abroad.
German statesman Otto von Bismarck famously observed that Europe represented merely a geographical notion, not a unified political entity. Russia's annexation of Crimea has again validated this acerbic insight. And, amid the absence of any Western or European unity, the sale of the France's highly advanced Mistral-class warships to Russia looms large.
Not all that long ago, Barack Obama seemed to have big plans for the Middle East. Back in June of 2009, the president traveled to Egypt to unveil what he promised would be a “new beginning” between America and the Muslim world. In a major address at Cairo’s famed Al-Azhar University, he proposed a new, more harmonious U.S. approach toward a region that had been roiled by nearly a decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The new Palestinian unity government of Fatah and Hamas puts the lie to fundamental assumptions on which the U.S. approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace have long rested, most prominently within the Obama administration.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the recent national election in Ukraine is just how significant a reversal of fortune it represents for Russia.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has called Russia’s invasion, occupation and annexation of the Crimean peninsula. along with its incitement of a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. a game-changer. One region where this description could possess particular resonance is Central Asia. All Central Asian governments have considerable reasons for alarm in the wake of Russia’s actions and the supine Western response. In this context, Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Duma of March 18, 2014 represented a landmine under the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all five Central Asian states with the threat of Russian military action should they somehow threaten the dignity and honor of Russians who are citizens in their states.
Will the real Hassan Rouhani please stand up? Since his election last summer - and especially since the start of nuclear negotiations with the West last fall - Iran's new president has become a darling of the U.S. and European diplomatic set. The soft-spoken leader who now serves as Iran's political face is widely viewed as a "moderate" counterpoint to his firebrand predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as a guarantor of a much-sought-after nuclear deal with the West.
During U.S Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's recent trip to China, China's Minister of Defense, General Chang Wanquan, warned that Beijing would make "no compromise, no concession, [and] no trading" in the fight for what he called his country's "territorial sovereignty." Chang told Hagel: "The Chinese military can assemble as soon as summoned, fight any battle, and win." The comments come amid an escalating campaign by Chinese nationalists to alter the status quo in the Western Pacific that has raised alarm in capitals across the region.
Tucked away in a busy corner of the Pentagon is a little-known bureau known as the Office of Net Assessment. Headed by Andrew W. Marshall, the legendary nonagenarian strategist who has advised every American president since Richard Nixon, it serves as the U.S. military's in-house think tank on a broad range of foreign policy and defense issues. Its specialty, however, is a very specific discipline: the study of the different ways in which the United States can identify and exploit emerging trends in an increasingly complex geopolitical environment.
The future path of U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran, which have now reached a crucial stage, may be foreshadowed in the U.S. agreement with Syria to dismantle its chemical weapons program. Any U.S.-Iranian deal-making that follows the Syrian model, however, would prove nothing more than a pyrrhic victory, leaving the Middle East more dangerous and, ultimately, the United States less secure.
Human rights and liberal values are under threat in a small, little-known country most people would be hard-pressed to find on a map. Brunei Darussalam, following the radical vision of Usama bin Laden and his followers, became an Islamic state under strict Sharia law this past week, with punishments of death by stoning for adulterers and severing of limbs for thieves. Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have yet to focus on the challenges posed by radical Islamic regimes, much less tackle them effectively.
Remember the U.S.-Turkish alliance? Not long ago, President Obama was proclaiming that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his favorite Middle Eastern statesman, and one of very few foreign leaders with whom he had forged a "bond of trust." Yet today, ties between Washington and Ankara are unmistakably on the downswing. The culprits are a quartet of issues that cumulatively have soured relations between Washington and Ankara — and which promise to keep the once-vibrant relationship at a low ebb, at least for the foreseeable future.
Recent Israeli-Palestinian peace talks raise questions as to why Washington invested so much in such a misbegotten venture, but they brought one salutary result - they laid bare the Obama Administration's hostility to the Jewish state
Give the Iranian regime credit for creativity. In the midst of extensive nuclear negotiations with the West, officials in Tehran have apparently hit upon a new way to play for time.
The most recent developments in Ukraine as of April 25 betray a mounting series of dangerous paradoxes. First, Russian officials from Putin down have consistently denied reports of Russian troops either in Crimea or now Eastern Ukraine. But Putin in his call-in show on April 17 admitted that they were present in Crimea and even linked that presence to the subsequent referendum though he claimed it was a fully democratic exercise where nobody was intimidated. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Putin and his officials deny the presence of Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine.
It seems more apparent that Russia's war against Ukraine also aims to impose a new ideological-political order in Russia if not the entire Commonwealth of Independent States. At home, this war has featured a massive, unrelenting propaganda offensive depicting Ukraine as a Hobbesian nightmare of civil anarchy and Russia as a unique Christian civilization under siege from the secularizing and nihilistic West. Russia explains the siege against it in geopolitical terms — as an effort to prevent the country from becoming a great power again. Russia also presents the attack in ideological terms— as an attempt to foist an alien and corrupt Western civilization and culture upon it.
In the current debate over the Iranian bomb, the White House is staying quiet about its concerns over the regime’s progress on missile development. It’s the dog that isn’t barking.
Richard Falk, the current rapporteur for Palestine of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), is set to step down in the coming days. Falk’s primary legacy will be his consistent hounding of Israel, which he has accused, among other things, of engaging in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinians. Unfortunately, Falk never placed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in its proper context, nor did he properly compare Israel’s actions to those of the more serious violators of human rights, including Syria, North Korea and Sudan. He has thus made a mockery of the U.N. and done a disservice to the Palestinian people.
Just how much is Vladimir Putin's Ukrainian adventure actually costing Russia? Quite a lot, it turns out.
New statistics from the Central Bank of Russia indicate that almost $51 billion in capital exited the country in the first quarter of 2014. The exodus, says financial website Quartz.com, is largely the result of investor jitters over Russia's intervention in Ukraine and subsequent annexation of Crimea.