This week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives in Washington for a much publicized state visit. The Turkish leader won't simply be making a courtesy call, however. His U.S. mission is largely aimed at achieving one purpose: goading the Obama administration into taking greater action on Syria.
Ever since last month’s bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation has abounded as to what led the perpetrators — suspected to be ethnic Chechens 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar — to carry out the most significant act of terrorism on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. By all accounts, both were largely homegrown radicals who received inspiration, and perhaps even dangerous instruction, from jihadist elements in the United States and abroad. The roots of the Tsarnaevs’ militancy can be traced back at least in part to Russia’s own troubled “war on terrorism” — a struggle that Moscow, more than two decades after the Soviet collapse, is in real danger of losing.
Israel's military strikes in Syria leave the interested observer with admiration over Jerusalem's steadfastness, disgust over Washington's continued dithering, and worry over the long-term global implications.
To be sure, Syria is both a humanitarian horror and a geopolitical mess and, at this point, no one's got a clean, easy, fool-proof way to stop the slaughter and ensure that, after Bashar al-Assad falls, the nation won't become an even more dangerous safe haven for anti-Western terrorists.
Although most observers tend to treat them as separate phenomena, there is an intimate connection between North Korea's recent nuclear and long-range missile tests and China's growing push to control the vast oil and gas resources in the South China Sea and the associated sea lanes through which trillions of dollars in commerce travel.
Amid all the media focus on China’s maritime territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, the world nearly forgot that China still hosts the world’s largest outstanding land border dispute with the world’s largest democracy, India.
For better or worse, governments tend to be defined by their handling of foreign crises. Weather one well, and you project an image of strong, principled leadership, much like the way Margaret Thatcher's government managed its dispute with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Dither or delay, and you telegraph an air of provocative weakness. (Think Jimmy Carter and Iran.)
President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, recently set a September date for bilateral discussions. The goal is to mend ties between the U.S. and Russia, badly frayed by the recent passage of tit–for–tat human rights sanctions, and attempt to put the administration's "reset" of relations with the Kremlin back on track. The White House has already suggested disarmament, Iran, North Korea and Syria as the main topics for the talks.
The civil war in Syria is over two years old with no end in sight. As matters stand, the future holds either continued bloody stalemate or a successor regime dominated by anti-Western radicals. The time has come to force a more favorable decision.
These days, American policy toward the Middle East tends to be dominated by two regional crises.
The first is the long-running showdown with Iran over its nuclear program. Despite mounting Western financial pressure, the Islamic republic shows no signs of changing course. To the contrary, Iran’s leaders have defiantly tightened their fiscal belts and redoubled their efforts to cross the nuclear Rubicon. Meanwhile, negotiations between Tehran and the West have concluded predictably, without any tangible progress on bringing the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions to heel.
The apprehension of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ends a five day reign of terror in the Boston area. Taking him alive allows authorities the opportunity to find answers to critical questions surrounding the deadly April 15 Boston marathon bombing. Most important of this is, why did Dzhokhar and his brother Tamarlan allegedly do it?
Western thinking about freedom and democracy is marked by a set of optimistic assertions, which include the following:
First, the global advance of freedom and democracy marches ever-onward. Second, economic and political freedoms in a particular nation walk hand in hand, each reinforcing the other. Third, the more a society (particularly its middle class) enjoys economic growth and the higher living standards that normally come with it, the more citizens will push for greater political freedom.
Secretary of State John Kerry made news recently by referring to the venue of the latest nuclear talks with Iran as the fictional country of "Kyrzakhstan." That off-the-cuff comment was a telling indicator of the general lack of concern for Central Asia that prevails in official Washington.
With international pressure over its nuclear program mounting, and the recent collapse of its latest round of negotiations with the West, this might seem like a strange time for Iran to pick a fight with its neighbors. Yet on at least one front, that is exactly what it appears to be doing. Recent days have seen a marked downturn in the already-troubled relationship between the Islamic Republic and Azerbaijan, its neighbor to the northwest.
On the surface, the Cyprus crisis was about money, but actually it was the result of conflicting political cultures: European, Greek Cypriot and Russian. The fissures exposed during the March 2013 crisis will leave a legacy of mistrust and enmity far beyond the eastern Mediterranean island that staged the drama. The underlying problem was that Europe had accepted a non-European entity (Cyprus) into its institutions and then failed to enforce upon it Europe’s standards of financial governance. Russian money became fuel for the catastrophe, but was not itself the cause. Money laundering and bank insolvency are both deplorable but are not the same thing.
Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry all but confirmed that it plans to sell its longtime ally Pakistan a new 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor. The deal, reportedly signed in February, is a cause for concern in Washington. Though nominally a U.S. ally, Pakistan already has the world's fastest-growing nuclear-weapons arsenal and one of the world's worst nuclear-proliferation records. It is a country perpetually under threat from religious fanaticism, political instability and economic mismanagement.
Years from now, historians may well write that the decline or upswing in the American empire of liberty occurred during the Obama presidency. They will either write that the Obama administration’s self-fulfilling prophecy and rhetoric of decline was overcome by the overwhelming greatness of the United States or that the ultimate downfall was caused by the conditions created by this White House.
Late last month, computers in Seoul became the latest victims of the growing number of cyber-intrusions now taking place worldwide. Approximately 32,000 computers belonging to South Korean banks and broadcasting stations were shut down by an unknown perpetrator, strongly suspected to be the notoriously unpredictable Stalinist regime in North Korea.
"Put yourself in their shoes," President Obama said of the Palestinians, imploring his Israeli audience in Jerusalem to work for peace. "Look at the world through their eyes.
The financial crisis in Cyprus is, among other things, a stress test in relations between Europe and Russia. Thus far, neither has performed very well.
Relations between Washington and Moscow are currently in a sterile phase, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Europeans, on the other hand, like to claim they are much more effective in understanding and managing the Russians. But are they?
President Obama's first journey to Israel as president comes amid earth-shattering change in Middle East, much of it for the worse. The Arab Spring, which once raised hopes of freedom and dignity, has diverged onto the dark path of Islamist authoritarian rule. In Syria, tens of thousands of people have died in a bitter civil war that might have recently seen its first use of chemical weapons. And Iran continues its march toward nuclear weapons capability, heedless of international condemnation. Obama's effort to seek peace between Palestinians and Israelis is in tatters.