U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Last month, Republicans bashed President Barack Obama for not meeting with the Dalai Lama during his swing through Washington, portraying the president as caving to pressure from Chinese “tyrants” who hold trillions of dollars in U.S. debt and view the Tibetan spiritual leader as Public Enemy No. 1. “You can bet the Chinese are using their influence in ways we do not even know about,” warned Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Republican co-chair of the Congressional Tibet Caucus. “This goes way beyond the Dalai Lama. The U.S. has permitted China to have a one-way free trade policy for decades, and now […]

BEIJING — One of the issues President Barack Obama will inevitably discuss when he visits China next week is the deadlocked Six-Party Talks seeking to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. Perhaps the most important difference between the 1994 Agreed Framework (.pdf), which settled the 1992-94 nuclear crisis, and the current Six-Party Talks is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been considerably more involved in supporting the latter process. Chinese policymakers initially promoted the Six-Party Talks primarily as a means of preventing Washington from adopting more coercive measures — whether severe sanctions or military attacks — toward the […]

For roughly four decades, a clear foreign policy rule set has existed between the United States and Latin America, centering largely on the question of counternarcotics. Starting with Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” an explicit quid pro quo came into existence: U.S. foreign aid (both civilian and military) in exchange for aggressive Latin American efforts to curb both the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics (primarily marijuana and cocaine). By virtually all accounts, that logistics-focused strategy has proven to be a massive failure. America’s focus on interdiction and prohibition has not stemmed domestic drug abuse. Instead, all indications are that […]

Yesterday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs Kurt Campbell wrapped up what he called an “exploratory mission” to Burma by meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy advocate kept under house arrest by the Burmese regime. The two-day visit, during which Campbell also met with the country’s prime minister, comes nearly a month after U.S. Sen. Jim Webb became the highest-ranking U.S. official to date to meet with the junta, and a week after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Obama administration’s plan to engage with the reclusive military junta that rules […]

Editor’s note: As noted below, this will be the final “Under the Influence” column at World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Andrew Bast for his contributions to WPR over the past 10 months. It’s been a pleasure working with him, and we wish him the best of success in all his endeavors. As this will be the final “Under the Influence” column here at World Politics Review, it seems only fitting to tackle what Charles Krauthammer, the iconic commentator, recently had to say about the question this column has been exploring for the last 10 […]

Ten years ago last month, the U.S. Senate failed to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. A decade later, the dangers posed by the potential spread of nuclear weapons and materials to additional states and terrorists have increased dramatically. Stopping proliferation will require a global effort — and an early, essential step in that effort must be U.S. ratification of the test ban. The test ban is clearly consistent with U.S. security interests. Because the United States does not conduct nuclear tests and has no plans or the need to do so, the United States should take advantage of the […]

Much ink has been spilt over the question of whether or not globalization leads to the “death” of the nation-state, or at least its eclipse by a rising tide of super-empowered non-state actors — especially multinational corporations. On this score, history has been fairly clear: States that score high on globalization connectivity typically feature governments with extensive regulatory reach and strong enforcement capacity — not exactly the demise of the public sector. And yet, it’s also true that globalization’s increasingly dense weave of networks poses significant challenges to government oversight. I can think of no credible expert who argues that […]