With most Americans focused on the Islamic State terrorist group, Washington is poised to greatly expand the dangers to U.S. national security on another front - by proceeding to execute the Iran nuclear accord while Tehran ignores its obligations under it and related United Nations Security Council resolutions.
Before year's end, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is reportedly planning to conduct a second freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) around one of China's new artificial islands in the South China Sea. Designed to show that the United States will not recognize any Chinese attempt to establish expansive maritime rights around its man-made outposts, the operation will mark the second mission in as many months, after an October 27 FONOP around China's Subi Reef.
On November 12, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President Obama waxed optimistic about the current state of U.S. counterterrorism strategy. His administration’s efforts over the past year had successfully “contained” the Islamic State, Obama said. “I don’t think they’re gaining strength.”
As we contemplate the complex diplomacy that created the recent agreement between the international community and Iran regarding the Islamic Republic's nuclear future, it is worth remembering Thomas Friedman's momentarily famous remark of a few years ago that, whatever else it may be, Iran is also a country ripe for catalytic political change. In passing this judgment, the New York Times columnist took special note of Iran's youthful and vibrant population, the deep knowledge base of Iranian society as a whole, and its interconnectedness with the outside world.
Beijing is bullish on Iran. In meetings there earlier this month, we heard senior government and party officials express uniform support and optimism in their assessment of the nuclear agreement struck this summer between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 powers, terming it "good for Iran and good for the world."
The first part is certainly true. Iran has emerged as the undisputed winner of the long-running negotiations with the West over its nuclear ambitions.
Like the optimistic boy in Ronald Reagan's charming quip who searches through pile-high manure in hopes of finding a pony, the Obama administration continues trying to entice the cooperation of Iran on regional issues even in the face of its growing hostility toward the United States.
Over the past few months, a new and divisive word has begun provoking debate across China. That word is niguo, translated as "your country", and it is the most prominent of a new lexicon of words that both mainland and overseas Chinese are using online to distance themselves from the injustice, bigotry and bad behaviour that have become commonplace in China. Lacking an open arena within which to freely express their opinions on important matters that affect their lives, a new generation of tech-savvy Chinese is using niguo to rhetorically opt out of the system and distance themselves from the Communist Party.
Last Sunday, Iran and the P5+1 countries (the U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia, and Germany) formally adopted the new nuclear agreement concluded this summer. In coming days, under the terms of the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Islamic Republic is obliged to begin implementing a series of curbs on its nuclear program.
U.S. freedom of navigation operations could take the U.S.-China relationship past a point of no return.
The global response to recent Palestinian terror in Israel highlights the world's appallingly exceptional treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that infantilizes both sides and only encourages more terror.
Those who oppose the gift or sale of defensive weapons to Ukraine have long rested their argument on a simple supposition: that any level of help the West might muster will inevitably be exceeded by Russian military escalation. After all, they argue, Ukraine is more important to Russia than it is to the United States. Lost in this argument, though, is the clear fact that Ukraine is more important to Ukrainians than it is to Russians - including many Ukrainians who are Russian speakers and/or ethnically Russian.
On a leafy street in the Ukrainian capital, just steps from the ornate building that houses the country's parliament, sits what is perhaps the nation's most powerful weapon in its protracted battle of ideas with Russia. There, tucked away in a once beautiful tsarist-era building, are the offices of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute. It is a tiny government agency with a massive mandate: to counter decades of Russian intellectual disinformation.
Don't believe the hype surrounding Russia's involvement in Syria. Ever since President Vladimir Putin launched a major escalation of the 4 1/2-year-old conflict there last month, Western media has been awash with commentary about the Kremlin's strategy, with most interpreting it as a function of Moscow's strength — and Washington's weakness.
It's an image that the Kremlin is eager to stoke, for obvious political reasons. Yet Russia's intervention in Syria also carries serious downsides for the Kremlin — negatives that are likely to come back to haunt Russia's leaders in the not-too-distant future
Unlike some critics of the Afghan war, I do not believe the conflict was unjust or doomed to failure. I simply agree with the assessment of the U.S. director of national intelligence in 2009: “No improvement in Afghanistan is possible without Pakistan taking control of its border areas.”
"I want Russia to be successful," President Barack Obama told reporters on Friday after chastising Vladimir Putin for his stepped-up militarism in Syria. "This is not a contest between the United States and Russia. It is in our interest for Russia to be a responsible, effective actor on the international stage that can share burdens with us, along with China, along with Europe, along with Japan, along with other countries - because the problems we have are big."
Timing is everything. On September 20, Pope Frances met with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Havana. Three days later, Cuban President Raúl Castro was photographed in a three-way handshake with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Rodrigo Londoño, known as Timochenko, the commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Castro’s hands were clasped over theirs as if he were blessing a marital union. And, in a way, he was. The Colombian government and FARC had just announced that, after over two years of negotiations, they had come to an agreement on transitional justice, the last point on their four-point peace talks agenda.
"We need to get to the negotiation," Secretary of State John Kerry said of efforts to convince Syria's Bashar Assad to step down. "That's what we're looking for, and we hope Russia and Iran, [and] other countries with influence, will help to bring that about, because that's what's preventing this crisis from ending."
JERUSALEM - It's all over but the shouting. Over the past week, the political tug-of-war over President Obama's controversial nuclear deal with Iran has tilted decisively in favor of the White House.
Despite widespread disapproval among the American electorate, and last-ditch attempts by some in Congress to delay its passage, it increasingly appears that the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, will soon be a done deal.
In mid-August, during the latest wave of violence in the long-running Ukraine crisis, Russian President Vladimir Putin and a coterie of other Kremlin officials trekked out to Crimea. The high-profile visit was intended as a public sign of the Kremlin's enduring commitment to its newest territorial holding. But behind the headlines, the story is far less reassuring: Russia is realizing that its Crimean annexation has become an increasingly costly venture in both political and economic terms.
When the proposed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the P5+1 powers was announced in July, it was sold as a tough deal with robust verification that blocked Iran's pathways to nuclear weapons and would lead to peace and stability in the region. However, it soon became apparent that the deal is much weaker than its proponents first suggested. With a vote on Capitol Hill approaching, members of Congress who rushed early to support the proposed deal need to take another look at their positions. The deal as announced weeks ago is already falling apart.
Ukraine is at war. Since the spring of 2014, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign of aggression against its smaller western neighbor. Moscow’s “hybrid warfare” in support of separatist enclaves in Ukraine’s Donbass region has included the insertion of military forces to augment pro-Russian insurgents, large-scale deliveries of military matériel to these fighters, and the widespread use of propaganda. The Kremlin’s efforts have met with political and economic pressure from the West, in the form of multilateral sanctions imposed by the Obama administration and the European Union. However, the strongly negative effects of this pressure on the Russian economy have not caused the Kremlin to change course in any meaningful way.
In late July, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs assembled a number of top experts to discuss a critical threat to the homeland: electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
In July, President Barack Obama said that he hoped the proposed nuclear deal with Iran could lead to continued conversations with the Islamic regime "that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative," and to generally behave in the way nations in the international community are expected to behave. The most optimistic proponents of the deal believe that the process could open the door to more comprehensive detente, empower Iranian moderates and lead to a gradual, peaceful form of regime change - a change of heart, if not of leadership.
What's next after the Obama administration's opening to Cuba? Why, an embassy in Tehran, of course.
On Aug. 14, in a ceremony replete with pomp and circumstance, Secretary of State John Kerry presided over the formal re-opening of the US Embassy in Havana, Cuba. The occasion marked the culmination of nearly two years of quiet diplomacy between the White House and the Castro regime.
A central plank of the Obama administration's case for the nuclear deal just concluded by the P5+1 powers is that the agreement closes off "all pathways" by which the Iranian regime could acquire a nuclear capability, at least for the coming decade.
Not all that long ago, it seemed as if the United States could learn a thing or two from Europe when it came to economic pressure on Iran. Today, a great deal has changed.
Even as the fledgling Obama administration stuck doggedly to its "engagement" policy toward Tehran, European capitals were rapidly heading in the opposite direction. In November 2009, in a move that caused nothing short of a political earthquake on the Old Continent, a majority of the Dutch parliament formally voted to place Iran's clerical army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on the European Union's terror list.
Don’t forget what's really at stake for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
On December 17, 2013, the Financial Crimes and Battle Against Criminal Incomes department of the Istanbul Security Directory detained 47 people, including a number of high-level officials. The sons of the minister of the Interior, the minister of Economy, and the minister of Urban Planning were implicated, as was Erdogan's own son, Bilal, with all three ministers handing in resignations.
President Barack Obama says that 99 percent of the world supports his proposed nuclear deal with Iran. He had better check his math.
Since its historic rapprochement with Beijing in the 1970s, America has approached a rising China with an "engagement" strategy guided by two key assumptions: first, that political liberalization would ultimately follow economic growth; and second, that supporting China's integration into the global order would preempt Beijing from forcibly challenging that order. While confidence in those assumptions has waxed and waned, never did a consensus emerge that they were fundamentally flawed - until now.
Buried within the 150-plus pages of technical minutia and regulations that make up the recently concluded nuclear deal between the P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran lies a stunning revelation, the full import of which has not yet been adequately appreciated by the international community. It is that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the agreement is formally known, is designed to serve as nothing less than a Marshall Plan for the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.
The White House says the only alternative to the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran is war. However it is the deal itself that is pushing the Middle East towards conflict.
As Vladimir Putin's international image continues to decline, his domestic popularity has, paradoxically, reached an all-time high. The most recent poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center reports a staggering 89 percent approval rating for the Russian president, in spite of a stumbling economy, declining living standards, rampant corruption and deepening international isolation.
Even before it was formally published late last month, Michael Oren's memoir of his time as Israel's envoy to the United States had ignited a firestorm of controversy, and for very good reason. His book, Ally: My Journey across the American-Israeli Divide, provides the most damning account to date of a "special relationship" that, on President Obama's watch, has deteriorated to an almost unthinkable degree, with the White House coming to view Israel and its often-pugnacious premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, as more of a problem than Iran's nuclear ambitions, Palestinian corruption, or the Syrian civil war.
For decades, first the Soviet Union and then Russia languished under adverse population trends. Deaths far outpaced births, life expectancy was dismally low, and social ills, from alcoholism to unsafe abortion practices, were rampant.
If North Korea could develop and test a nuclear weapon, even under a stringent arms control regime, why can't Iran also build a bomb under a far less ample nuclear deal?
Amid multiple signs of an impending battle in Ukraine, NATO and Ukraine have stepped up their response. But so has Russia.
By July 2015 it was clear that Russia is paying a steep economic price for its war in Ukraine. Poverty, inflation, unemployment are all rising, the economy is shrinking, and foreign investment is drying up. Moscow had to cut spending on the 2018 FIFA World CUP, pensions, and infrastructure, not to mention health care, education, science and technology, and infrastructure, i.e. human and social capital.
Those in America's foreign policymaking circles who are concerned about the emerging U.S.-led nuclear agreement with Iran are increasingly pinning their hopes not on Washington changing its negotiating posture but, instead, on Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei walking away from the table.
On June 18, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel offered a press preview of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue (S&ED) now taking place in Washington, D.C. During the briefing Russel fielded a question about U.S. efforts to reduce tensions with China in the South China Sea. His response was surprising: "As important as [the] South China Sea is... it's not fundamentally an issue between the U.S. and China."
It would be fair to say that the past year-and-a-half of nuclear talks with Iran has not been America's finest negotiating hour. But even by the comparatively low standards of U.S. diplomacy to date, the collapse of the American position in recent days has been nothing short of breathtaking.
The euphoria to which Turkey’s June 7 election results have given rise calls to mind an oncology ward patient learning that an experimental protocol might slow the advance of her tumor. The elation is warranted in rough proportion to the desperation of the situation. In other words, good news is, like most things, relative.
If, as Marx taught, history repeats itself "first as tragedy, then as farce," then Washington's latest reported concession proves that U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran have moved from the tragic to the farcical.
For 13 years, the escape routes from Turkey's political haunted-house have been shutting one by one. Suffocation seemed inevitable. The June 7 election, which resulted in the first hung parliament since 1999, cracked open a tiny window in the attic. Turkey's hope is now predicated upon an unlikely scenario: One in which every major political group exits from that window in an orderly fashion, even as the smoke is rising.
After a heated battle last month, the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015, commonly known as trade promotion authority, which gives the president the ability to negotiate trade deals and submit them to Congress as a whole for an up or down vote, which, these days, is an essential step towards passage. The fight now moves to the House of Representatives, where passage is critical as both chambers must agree on the final text of the pending trade promotion authority bill.
Over the weekend, Turkey experienced something resembling an electoral earthquake, with Sunday's general election yielding an array of unexpected outcomes that suggest a major political reconfiguration lies ahead for the Republic.
The Chinese military is expanding disputed islands under its control in the South China Sea, alarming its neighbors. How worried should the world be that supreme leader Xi Jinping is making China into an expansionary power? The history of the People's Republic offers some useful clues.
In the frenzied discussions now taking place in Washington about how to prevent the Islamic State terrorist group from making further territorial advances in Iraq and Syria, one topic has been conspicuously absent so far.
Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno, Colombia's minister of defense, is constantly on the move, traveling all over the country to meet with members of the armed forces and citizens as part of his duties. At any given moment, he may be on a military base awarding medals to the wounded in action, in a helicopter surveying a ministry-funded resettlement village for a displaced indigenous tribe, or in a remote rural village once ravaged by rebel violence, inaugurating five miles of road rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"Interviews with scientists is completely out of the question and so is inspection of military sites," Abbas Araqchi, Iran's senior negotiator on its nuclear program, announced on state television on Saturday, just as Secretary of State John Kerry was conferring with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a final push to meet the June 30 deadline for an Iran nuclear agreement.
A recent weekend brought two very different dispatches from the front lines of the global war on terror. The first was a tale of tactical success; the second a narrative of strategic failure.