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.
We run the risk of missing critical aspects of Russian policy if we assume that Moscow's continuing invasions of Ukraine are exclusively about Russo-Ukrainian issues. One of the founding fathers of Soviet studies, Adam Ulam, observed back in 1965 that empire was the biggest obstacle to reform in Russian history.
Albert Einstein is said to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Today, U.S. policy toward Ukraine has become the embodiment of Einstein's admonition.
International attention is now riveted on the crisis in Ukraine, but another beleaguered U.S. ally is rapidly approaching a critical crossroads as well. As the U.S. military prepares to exit Afghanistan after more than a decade of war, real questions remain about the country’s future. Perhaps most urgent, and of greatest significance to the United States, is the capacity of Afghanistan’s forces to successfully fight the Taliban and al-Qaida.
With national elections in India taking place this month, the health of the U.S.-India relationship is under the spotlight, and the early prognosis is relatively grim. The sudden resignation of the U.S. Ambassador to India and a rocky start to relations with favored prime minister candidate Narendra Modi are symbolic of a broader malaise that has afflicted Indo-U.S. relations since 2008.
By all accounts, Vladimir Putin appears to be winning. Over the past month, Russia’s wily president has managed to orchestrate the asymmetric invasion of a neighboring state (Ukraine) and annex a new territory into the Russian Federation (Crimea).
U.S. scholars’ mounting boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutions are ironic indeed, for they contradict everything that higher education is supposed to stand for — they are wholly ignorant and profoundly narrow-minded.
“First as tragedy, second as farce.” It’s Karl Marx’s line about history repeating itself but, per the Jonathan Pollard trial balloon of recent days, the line could just as easily apply to America’s foreign policy.
Usually states resolve international crises by negotiations. In that context we must remember that by any standard Russia's invasion, occupation, and annexation of Crimea are premeditated acts of war and aggression. On March 30 Secretary of State Kerry met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov to discuss Ukraine's future. Unfortunately, these talks cannot represent a basis for resolving the crisis. We should remember that Secretary Kerry repeatedly warned Moscow that annexation of Crimea would close the door to negotiations. So we may ask what there is to talk about unless the invasion, occupation and annexation of Crimea are revoked and Ukraine fully participates in any negotiation.
The United Nations says the globe is heating up and that there are rising risks of catastrophe from continued carbon emissions. However the United States is riding the wave of a fossil-fuel boom that has made it the number one energy producer in the world. Reconciling these facts is a critical emerging foreign policy priority.
With all eyes on Ukraine, where Russia's neo-imperial efforts have raised the specter of a new Cold War between Moscow and the West, another alarming facet of the Kremlin's contemporary foreign policy has gone largely unnoticed; namely, its growing military presence in, and strategic designs on, the Western Hemisphere.