"I can assure you," Wendy Sherman, President Barack Obama's lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal, said the other day, "that if Iran takes truly horrific terrorist action, or truly horrific human rights action, that people will respond." Uh huh.
Last month, Sri Lanka officially lifted a hold on the Colombo Port City project, a $1.4 billion Chinese initiative to construct a "mini-city" atop reclaimed land at the country's capital. The project is the largest in Sri Lanka's history and falls under Beijing's One Belt, One Road and New Silk Road initiatives, which are designed in part to expand and secure China's trade routes throughout Asia.
At first glance, Madinat Al Irfane seems like an odd location from which to launch a global war of ideas against Islamic radicalism. The upscale middle-class suburb of Rabat is packed with nondescript office buildings and recently built apartment blocks, telltale signs of the widening prosperity of Morocco's capital. But nestled behind these structures is a marker of a very different sort: a multimillion-dollar academic campus that houses the kingdom's premier religious training academy, formally known as the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams.
Whatever happened to al-Qaeda? A decade-and-a-half ago, it perpetrated the single largest act of international terrorism to ever take place on American soil. Yet, these days, Osama bin Laden's terror network barely warrants a mention in the mainstream news media. Instead, it is al-Qaeda's onetime Iraqi franchise, now known as the Islamic State, or ISIL, which commands near total attention in both politics and the press. That has never been more true than on Iraq's bloodiest day of 2016 when bombs swept through Baghdad killing at least 93.
The Balkans are burning. Europe's refugee crisis has now entwined with the general crisis of governance afflicting the Balkans, and reached its apogee in Macedonia.
The security situation in North Africa is growing increasingly dire, with destabilized countries and growing terrorist groups. Meanwhile, the U.S. combatant command for the region has been stuck in Germany for eight years. It is time to make another attempt to find a host country in Africa, and Morocco may be the place.
It is widely known that Russia has a difficult relationship with its past. In the quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union, successive governments in Moscow have been conspicuously consistent in skirting serious questions about the repressive nature of the now-defunct Soviet state and minimizing the shadow that it continues to cast over the Kremlin.
Largely unnoticed by the West, Vladimir Putin has just launched a radical overhaul of power in Russia. On April 5th, the Russian President formally announced the creation of a new National Guard intended to serve as an umbrella organization and coordinating body for the country's numerous "force ministries."
"I think the president would like to do it," John Roos, President Barack Obama's former ambassador to Tokyo, said the other day about a possible Obama visit to Hiroshima when he attends the Group of Seven Summit next month in Japan. "He is a person who bends over backwards to show respect to history, and it does advance his agenda."
That a visit to Hiroshima, on which President Harry Truman dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb, would advance Obama's agenda is clear. He has long envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, announced steps to pursue it in a high-profile speech in Prague in April of 2009, and continues to push for U.S.-Russian cuts in nuclear arsenals and global efforts to secure loose nuclear materials.
We're witnessing a strange spectacle in U.S. foreign policy, one with no obvious precedent: President Barack Obama is trying desperately to protect his cherished nuclear deal with Iran, making one concession after another in response to Iran's post-deal demands to ensure that Tehran doesn't walk away from it.
Last week, a fresh political scandal erupted on Capitol Hill over Iran. At issue was a new plan being considered by the Obama administration to provide Iran's ayatollahs with limited access to the U.S. financial system as a sweetener for their continued compliance with their government's 2015 nuclear deal with the nations of the P5+1.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's March 14 announcement of a partial withdrawal of forces from Syria predictably surprised the Obama administration, which is habitually surprised by the current occupant of the Kremlin. In doing so, it became part of a larger pattern. Recent Russian-American ties demonstrate all too clearly that President Barack Obama still fails to grasp what it is, exactly, that Russia wants - and why it is successfully achieving these objectives despite the country's growing domestic crises.
Call it Vladimir Putin's "mission accomplished" speech.
The Russian president recently caused an international furor when he abruptly announced that his government was commencing a military withdrawal from Syria. Russia had "radically changed the situation" on the ground through its involvement, and its strategic objectives had been "generally accomplished," Putin said in a televised meeting with top advisors in Moscow, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. As a result, Russia's commander-in-chief declared, he had made the decision "to start withdrawal of the main part of our military group from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic starting from tomorrow."
Iranians are famously savvy negotiators, so recent revelations that, under the U.S.-led global nuclear deal, Iran has far more leeway than we had thought to hide its nuclear progress and test ballistic missiles shouldn't surprise us.
It should, however, alarm us.
In the current political season, it's the policy dog that isn't barking.
Over the past several primary debates, candidates on both sides of the aisle have sparred at length over national security, offering contrasting - if still vague - strategies for dealing with Russia, the Islamic State and Iran, among other foreign policy challenges. But precious little attention has so far been paid to a more fundamental question: Does the U.S. military actually have the resources to adequately respond to today's global threats?
On Friday, Iranians went to the polls to select new representatives for the country's legislature, known as the Majles, and its Assembly of Experts, the powerful clerical body that oversees the performance of Iran's supreme leader. The results reflect a stronger-than-expected showing from the country's so-called "reformist" camp, particularly the political circles surrounding Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.
As expected, last summer's nuclear deal is already shaping up to be an economic boon for Iran. From stepped-up post-sanctions trade with countries in Europe and Asia to newfound access to some $100 billion in previously escrowed oil revenue, the agreement (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) has put the country on the path toward a sustained national recovery.
Henry Kissinger famously remarked some time ago that Iran must decide whether it wants to be "a nation or a cause." For decades, U.S. presidents of both parties have been trying to coax Tehran toward the former and away from the latter.
Most recently, the U.S.-led global nuclear agreement with Iran - with its scores of billions in sanctions relief that President Obama hoped Iran would invest to improve the living standards of its people - was designed to convince Tehran to abandon its revolutionary ways and become a nation in good standing.
Recent media accounts have argued that the U.S. government suffers from an absence of high-quality expertise on Russia. These accounts correctly note that funding for careers to ensure career opportunities for a continuing flow of people interested in Russia has dried up as well as the quantitative as well as qualitative lack of capable analysts. Undoubtedly we suffer from a shortage of funding and of professional interest in Russia, which is widely regarded as a busted flush of little account despite Ukraine and Syria. This shortage tallies with the president and his administration’s view that Russia is a declining regional power. Yet, as we have seen reality continues to belie such shortsighted thinking, particularly when it comes to the information battlefield and America’s struggle to contest Russian dominance in the weaponization of information used by the Kremlin against the United States and NATO.