There's a tried-and-true rule in politics that, when there's trouble at home, it's time to look abroad. The Iranian regime is proving to be no exception to this axiom; as its economic fortunes have dimmed as a result of widening Western sanctions, the Iranian regime has ramped up its interference throughout the Middle East.
The United States, like most of the industrialized world, is currently engaged in a race to develop viable, non-Chinese sources of the rare earth elements that are so critical to modern technologies. And we better move fast, or we will lose that race.
“I am with the Uprising of Women in the Arab World,” says a sign that Marwa (from Tunisia) holds in front of her, “because women’s sexuality is considered as a [sic] Taboo, while Sexism, Pedophilia, and Rape are seen as commonsense.”
Foreign policy seemed to go on hiatus during the U.S. presidential election. Economic issues dominated the race, and Americans waited to see which candidate's vision would prevail. But the world kept turning, and in President Barack Obama's second term he will face a number of legacy issues from his previous four years and several emerging strategic challenges.
You might not be familiar with Sergei Magnitsky, the 37-year-old Russian lawyer who died of medical complications while languishing in a Moscow prison back in 2009. You should be — Magnitsky’s case is worth knowing, both because of what it says about the nature of the Russian state and because it could soon prompt a substantial shake-up in U.S.-Russian relations.
The security of many countries is being endangered by the United Arab Emirates, a confederation of seven small states located in the Arabian Peninsula. Usually considered a Western ally, this false friend also serves as a regional financial hub for mob figures, arms dealers, drug traffickers, jihadis, and rogue regimes. The White House and the Financial Action Task Force—set up by the G7 to combat money laundering and terrorism financing—have so far failed to take action to stop this emerging threat.
The next president must discard two longstanding but problematic pillars of U.S. policy in the Middle East and chart a new course that reflects both regional realities and the dynamic changes that are underway there.
For decades, presidents have sought to maintain regional stability by propping up pro-Western autocrats and to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the first step toward addressing broader regional issues.
The outrage seen on Pakistan's streets over the recent shooting of 14 year-old Malala Yousefzai is a welcome contrast to the silence that greets so many acts of violence there. The liberal lawmaker Salman Taseer, assassinated by his bodyguard in 2010 for daring to speak out against Pakistan's arcane blasphemy laws, received no such outpouring of sympathy. There was no public outcry earlier this year when a Pakistani cabinet minister personally offered a $100,000 reward to any man who killed the filmmaker behind an incendiary anti-Islam video.
Monday night's debate on foreign policy between President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, saw plenty of tactical agreement on issues such as strengthening sanctions against Iran and the need for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But at least one topic -- how America should approach the Middle East -- provided a marked contrast between the candidates.
Call it President Obama’s “October surprise.” This past weekend, just days before tonight’s much-anticipated presidential debate on foreign policy and national security, the New York Times reported that the White House appears to be on the cusp of a diplomatic breakthrough with Tehran—and that direct, one-on-one negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear effort could take place in the near future, following the U.S. presidential election in November.
Recent back-to-back visits to the United States by the top two leaders of Myanmar (better known as Burma) -- opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and current President Thein Sein -- have brought the Southeast Asian nation back into the international spotlight. They have also underscored the need for U.S. engagement as a bulwark against the economic uncertainty, ethnic tensions and civil unrest that continue to plague Burma's exceedingly fragile evolution.
You've got to feel a little sorry for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With his nuclear brinksmanship and inflammatory public rhetoric, Iran's firebrand president is accustomed to hogging the international spotlight. But recent days have seen him making news for a different reason entirely. Ahmadinejad is now fighting for his political life against domestic opponents who blame him for the country's current fiscal crisis.
As the world evolves, presenting new challenges to U.S. national security, the patterns of U.S. foreign aid should evolve with it.
Nowhere is this truer than in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and historically most influential state, which is gradually transforming itself from a Western-leaning secular autocracy into an increasingly Islamic state that's run by the anti-Western (specifically, anti-American) Muslim Brotherhood.
Quite suddenly, it seems, Iran’s economy is in serious trouble. In recent days, the country’s national currency has fallen to record lows against the U.S. dollar. On October 1st alone, the value of the Iranian rial declined by some 17 percent, collapsing to 34,700 to one American dollar. (It has since reportedly fallen still further). All told, the rial has lost more than 80 percent of its worth over the past year.
The troubling travails of Rimsha Masih, a Christian teenager who lives near Islamabad and is facing blasphemy charges for allegedly burning pages of the Koran to cook, reflects the growing intolerance toward religious minorities that amounts to what one expert calls a “gradual genocide” in Pakistan.
When it comes to American policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, one approach has tended to crowd out all others. Over time, economic sanctions have come to be seen as something of a catch-all—a panacea of sorts for the West's nagging problem with the Iranian regime and its persistent nuclear ambitions. As a result, policymakers in Washington, as well as their counterparts across the Atlantic, have invested tremendous time and energy in crafting an elaborate framework of economic pressure against the Iranian regime.
Late last month, many Americans experienced difficulties accessing their digital bank accounts and the Web sites of their financial institutions. The culprit wasn't a simple computer glitch, but a series of coordinated cyberattacks aimed at the U.S. financial sector.
At first blush, Argentina seems like an odd choice of partners for the Islamic Republic of Iran. The South American nation holds the dubious distinction of being the first victim of Iranian terrorism in the Western Hemisphere, suffering terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires that were carried out by Iranian-sponsored radicals in 1992 and 1994. Yet today, relations between Argentina and Iran are unmistakably on the upswing.
Recent revelations from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has both continued and expanded its uranium enrichment activities have focused attention anew on U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic — and what more can be done to stop Iran’s march toward the bomb.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to expel the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, from his country, perhaps Washington can finally set aside its ill-founded belief -- through presidencies of both parties -- that U.S. leaders can build productive ties to Moscow's strongman.
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. The event will be met with little fanfare in India, where China’s surprise invasion still evokes feelings of outrage and betrayal. But the episode may be worth remembering for another reason, as the first occasion when India shed its nonaligned scruples and formed a tactical military alliance with the United States.
For the moment, let's set aside the friction in U.S.-Israeli relations over Iran's nuclear program, which serves neither Washington nor Jerusalem.
Almost eleven years after the attacks of September 11, 2011, it’s still hard to discern exactly how we are faring in the struggle against radical Islam. The death in May 2011 of Osama Bin Laden was a key counterterrorism victory for the Obama administration—one that, according to the State Department, has helped put al-Qaeda on a “path of decline.” Yet it’s far too early to count the Bin Laden network out, as recent terrorist attacks by the group’s regional franchises in places like Yemen, Iraq and Mali make clear. Perhaps the most curious anomaly of our current counterterrorism fight, however, is the fact that the subject matter experts who serve at its intellectual front lines have found themselves unexpectedly under attack.
Jaap Polak walks gingerly these days, leaning on a cane or holding the rail as he climbs the stairs to his second-floor room at The Sparhawk, a comfortable waterfront resort in the southern Maine town of Ogunquit. That's where, for more than half a century, he and his wife, Ina Soep, have spent a few weeks in August -- and that's where I first got to know this couple and learned their remarkable story.
Tucked away in what is colloquially known as the “post-Soviet space,” the tiny, landlocked Central Asian republic of Tajikistan seems like an unlikely strategic prize. Yet a potentially significant geopolitical tug of war is brewing there between the United States and Russia. The stakes of this unfolding contest are high and involve continued Western access to Central Asia and, quite possibly, the political future of at least part of the region.
Will Israel, in fact, attack Iran? That question, a perennial one in the debate over Iran's nuclear program, has gained far greater urgency of late, as it is becoming increasingly clear that Western sanctions have failed to alter the Islamic Republic's strategic trajectory.
The West isn't the only part of the world going to Asia for commerce. Confronted with Western sanctions over its nuclear ambitions, Iran is increasingly turning to Asia's vast markets and its sympathetic governments.
A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" foreign policy enhanced American power and prestige around the world. Today, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan imperils his country's chances of regional preponderance by pursuing a policy of speaking pugnaciously and carrying no stick.
It is the most important country in the Muslim world. Its economy is already the 16th-largest on the planet, and—in marked contrast to those of its sluggish neighbors in Europe—continues to grow by leaps and bounds. And its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was recently ranked the most popular politician in the entire Middle East.
Following a 2-year investigation, U.S. prosecutors have submitted a mindboggling 30,000 pages of documentation and 2,000 recorded phone calls that paint an extensive picture of how one of Mexico's most powerful drug-trafficking organizations raises, moves and eventually washes its illicit funds.
In October 2011, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller revealed the thwarting of an elaborate plot by elements in Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington at a posh D.C. eatery, utilizing members of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel.
The foiled terrorist plot, with its Latin American connections, focused new attention on what had until then been a largely overlooked political phenomenon: the intrusion of the Islamic Republic of Iran into the Western Hemisphere. An examination of Tehran's behavioral pattern in the region over the past several years reveals four distinct strategic objectives: loosening the U.S.-led international noose to prevent it from building nuclear weapons; obtaining vital resources for its nuclear project; creating informal networks for influence projection and sanctions evasion; and establishing a terror infrastructure that could target the U.S. homeland.
Freedom and democracy don't come easily to a land that's known precious little of it over time. Often, a nation overthrows an authoritarian government and replaces it with a democratically elected one, only to see the new government subvert the rule of law and impose a new authoritarianism.
Everyone knows Europe faces the potential for Greek financial collapse, with serious ramifications for the euro zone and its financial institutions. Less discussed is the Greek impact on another key European institution, the less restrictive border regime instituted under the Schengen Treaty, and the danger of failure of constitutional democracy in an EU member state.
Recent developments in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere have convinced skeptics that U.S. human rights promotion in the Middle East causes more harm than good by inciting instability — positioning the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-Western forces to win elections or otherwise seize power.
When it comes to the financial markets, it is a rule of thumb that past success is a poor indicator of future performance. Sadly, it turns out, that's also the case with political science.
Take the latest offering from one of the field's best and brightest. Kenneth N. Waltz, a decorated professor at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley, is dean of the "neorealism" school in international relations theory -- a deep thinker whose 1965 book "Man, the State, and War" revolutionized our understanding of how nation-states behave.
It's no secret that the United Nations hasn't lived up to its billing as a champion of human rights and democratic values since its establishment in 1945. All too often, the UN system has aided and abetted some of the world's most odious regimes—and served as a political weapon for those countries against the West. Yet even by these standards, this summer has seen an unprecedented level of rot in the world's most powerful international forum.
Is Pakistan an enemy of the United States? For the past two years, the Obama administration has doggedly maintained that the South Asian nation remains a vital American ally, even as it has grappled with what it itself admits is a "complicated" relationship.
Europe and the U.S. may be in grim economic straits, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is doing just fine—at least if Iran's leaders are to be believed. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has insisted relentlessly that his country's economy is healthy, while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has christened the current Iranian calendar year as the "Year of Domestic Production and Support for Iranian Capital and Labor."
Across the Middle East, hopes for Arab-Israeli peace face obstacles that, of late, are rising on multiple fronts.
Fatah and Hamas are working toward a coalition government, which will further empower a terrorist group that's sworn to Israel's destruction and isolate Palestinian moderates; a candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood is assuming the presidency in Egypt while the emerging government is threatening to upend the longstanding Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; and an Iranian regime that increasingly threatens Israel's destruction continues to make progress toward nuclear weaponry.
Italian prosecutors have now detained the former head of the Vatican’s bank after searching his home and former office for suspected criminal behavior. Catholics and followers of the Holy See will be disappointed to learn that the Vatican’s bank appears to be embroiled in yet another financial scandal.
For all their ideological fervor, revolutions in practice tend to be fairly predictable affairs. More often than not, when the initial groundswell of popular discontent recedes, the best-organized and most ideologically cohesive political factions assume power and proceed to run the show according to their own preferences.
Law enforcement officials in China, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines have launched a blitzkrieg targeting money launderers who have been swindling and blackmailing average citizens throughout Asia to the tune of millions of dollars.
Delivering her Nobel Lecture after a 21-year delay, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi offered a timely reminder from the front lines of struggle.
“To be forgotten,” she said in her October 16th address in Oslo, “… is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out, ‘Don’t forget us!’ They meant: ‘Don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.’
On Wednesday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched down in Brazil for his first state visit to the South American nation since 2009. The ostensible reason is to attend the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, a high-profile gathering of more than 100 heads of state taking place in Rio de Janeiro. But high on Ahmadinejad’s priority list is an important bit of diplomacy: reinvigorating the once-robust ties between Tehran and Brasilia. For Iran, Brazil is a potential economic lifeline in the face of mounting international pressure.
On Monday and Tuesday, all eyes will be on Russia as it hosts the third round in the troubled international negotiations now under way between Iran and the West over the former's nuclear program.
How real is the potential for cyberwar? The growing attention being given to cyberspace by policymakers and the media alike reflects an inescapable reality. With government agencies and private companies under frequent attack in cyberspace, and with incidents of cyber espionage increasing in both intensity and frequency, it would be fair to say that the U.S. is already engaged in battle in cyberspace.
Bernard Lewis’ new book, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, written at the age of 95, is essentially his autobiography. Since he is, above all, a scholar, much of his life has been thinking and writing. Not surprisingly, the book recounts the gestational process of a number of his major works. Lewis is the author of more than 30 books. This leads him to wonder, in 100 years, which of his works will be remembered? I venture to say that it will not be this one, nor does he mean it to be. This is a breezy, episodic, conversational book of reflections, aperçus, anecdotes, and some very sharp observations. It is what is called a “good read.” It is not particularly profound or deep. It only glancingly refers to ideas that Lewis has developed at greater length in his earlier works. He refers to them rather than repeating them, and places their development in the context of his long life.
In the sixteen months since the ouster of its long-serving strongman, Hosni Mubarak, one question has stood at the heart of the turbulent political debate taking place in Egypt: who will ultimately end up in charge?
"Life," the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, "must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards."
What's true of individuals is true of nations. As we, as a nation, look back in an effort to understand our history, we invariably question some of the decisions we made -- and the horror we tolerated.