Publications

With two important diplomatic victories last month, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for the final chapters of the Afghan war.

When it comes to international diplomacy, success tends to be in the eye of the beholder. That’s certainly been the case in the latest bout of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Nearly 40 years ago, a Congress disgusted with the value-less foreign policy realism of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford began to require the State Department to report each year on the human rights records of other countries.

Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program.

To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other "P5+1" negotiators - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - want a deal.

One of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere is the city of Warnes, Bolivia, which lies a few kilometers outside the country’s industrial capital of Santa Cruz. There, set back in an open field off a bustling highway, is the new regional defense school of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA—the eight-member economic and geopolitical bloc founded by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro nearly a decade ago.

Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has made cybersecurity a major area of policy focus. The past year in particular has seen a dramatic expansion of governmental awareness of cyberspace as a new domain of conflict. In practice, however, this attention is still uneven. To date, it has focused largely on network protection and resiliency (particularly in the military arena) and on the threat potential of countries such as China and Russia. Awareness of what is perhaps the most urgent cybermenace to the U.S. homeland has lagged behind the times.

Amid signs that Armenia and Azerbaijan may once more be edging towards armed conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Wayne Merry argues that the West needs to act fast, rather than allow an old and fruitless mediation process to meander on.

After a two-year manhunt, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency last week arrested Colombian drug kingpin Javier Antonio Calle Serna, a senior leader of Los Rastrojos, one of the country’s most formidable drug-trafficking organizations. After being indicted last summer by the Eastern District of New York, Serna reportedly felt so squeezed by the agency and rival drug dealers that he began negotiating for his surrender.

Have we well and truly entered the “post-al-Qaeda era”? A year after Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. commandos, some experts and commentators are taking to the idea that the threat which preoccupied U.S. foreign policy for the past decade is now all but ancient history.

As Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad continues his slaughter, the issue is not whether more forceful U.S. action to stop him is risk-free.

Has the endgame on the Iranian nuclear program finally arrived? Is a deal in the cards? A broad swath of the foreign-policy cognoscenti, including Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, the National Interest’s Paul Pillar, The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, Esquire’s Richard Barnett and a host of others, seems to think so. They are optimistic about the current round of negotiations between Iran and the West and confident that - even if negotiations should somehow break down - Iran will not, indeed cannot, pose a real threat to the United States.

Will the Assad regime's suppression of its own version of the "Arab Spring" transform Syria into an unwavering ally of Iran and spell long-term hostility between Damascus and the Gulf Arab states now financing the Syrian rebels, as many now seem to believe? Not likely. Alliances in the Middle East are always in flux, and the Syrian case is no different. In fact, the Gulf States could find significant opportunity within their current adversity with Damascus.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was established by the G7 in 1989 to combat money laundering and terrorism finance.

Being on the FATF "high-risk" country list may not sound terrible but, in some circles, it is akin to being labelled a financial pariah.

Tomorrow, the United States and its fellow members of the “P5+1” (Russia, China, France, England and Germany) will sit down once again with Iran for what has been billed as the Islamic Republic’s “last chance” to come to terms with the West regarding its nuclear ambitions. The likely outcome of those talks, however, is already within view—and it is far from encouraging.

Though news reports generally give a very different impression, Russia is actually playing a constructive role in dealing with the multifaceted issue of Iran's nuclear program. One hint came last month, when Russia's second-largest financial institution closed the accounts of Iran's embassy in Moscow. While given little attention by the media on either side of the Atlantic, this move signals the Kremlin's willingness to confront Iran on its march toward nuclearization.