U.S. Foreign Policy Archive

Is the United Nations finally adapting to an Asian century? This week, Security Council ambassadors are visiting Bangladesh and Myanmar to investigate the suffering of the Rohingya. In doing so, they are facing up to one of the U.N.’s most significant failures of recent years. Both U.N. officials on the ground and council members in New York vacillated over how to respond to the ethnic cleansing campaign of Myanmar’s military against the Rohingya Muslim minorities in mid-2017. This weekend, the council saw the results of that failure when they visited a refugee camp that houses half a million of the […]

Unless you’re Rip Van Winkle, you probably already know that next month, international attention will be on the world’s two acute nuclear weapons cases: Iran and North Korea. May 12 is the deadline for U.S. President Donald Trump to decide if he will continue to waive sanctions against Iran as part of the seven-nation nuclear agreement signed in 2015. And all month long, teams in Washington and Pyongyang will be planning an unprecedented summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with the North’s nuclear program the main item on the agenda. There are at least two ways […]

Peace processes are always excruciatingly complex, in part because peacemaking is rarely just a matter of making peace. Power politics almost always gets in the way. Two particularly difficult cases that currently loom over international politics are heading in strikingly different directions. Multilateral efforts to end the Syrian war are grotesquely stalled. North and South Korea, by contrast, are hurtling toward peace with an almost indecent haste. The two cases offer very different visions of the future of major power cooperation and conflict, and above all the continuing role of America as a global peacemaker. Since the end of the […]

On the campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump said that to defeat the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the United States had to “take out their families.” As president, his attitude hasn’t changed. According to an account in The Washington Post, Trump was shown footage of a CIA drone strike in which the operators had refrained from firing “until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside.” Trump reportedly asked, “Why did you wait?” Collective punishment is not only morally depraved, it is also illegal and counterproductive. But while Trump’s drone comments rightfully deserve scrutiny, most reactions to them […]

In the horrible days following the 9/11 attacks, America’s full attention was on punishing the culprits and reinforcing its defenses against terrorism. While these tasks clearly had to take priority, the attacks also demonstrated that the United States needed to decide whether its 18th-century Constitution was adequate for national defense in the 21st century. Yet this issue still has yet to receive the consideration that it deserves. Although the United States has poured immense effort, money and blood into the fight against transnational extremism and dramatically augmented homeland security, it has not assessed its constitutional framework for national defense. But […]

Iraq has the potential to help bridge current regional divides in the Arab world and establish a functional model of equilibrium, which is why it should remain central to U.S. Middle East policy. As it approaches parliamentary elections next month, Iraq is not poised for either a major political transformation or massive security improvements. Instead, as a U.S. official who has worked on Iraq for many years has often noted to me, “Iraq is like a cancer patient, but a patient that we have some idea how to treat.” Despite that prognosis, the country should still be at the center […]

The early reactions of Syria’s neighbors to the joint strikes by the United States, France and the United Kingdom on three chemical weapons-related facilities last Friday night fell into familiar patterns. As the reality of the very limited nature of the attack sinks in, expect the full range of responses, capturing the deep ambivalence in the Middle East toward American power. Most countries in the region resent excessive demonstrations of what they see as American arrogance, but they miss American force when it is not there. Some even hoped in vain that the strikes would signal a new willingness for […]

A little more than a year into his administration, President Donald Trump is facing a major decision on America’s next steps in Syria. His predecessor, Barack Obama, first sent U.S. troops into the country’s civil war to help local opposition forces defeat the self-styled Islamic State. Trump then increased the number of U.S. forces on the ground there. But now that the Islamic State has been driven back in Syria, losing much of the territory it once claimed as its “caliphate,” Trump has indicated that he might withdraw U.S. forces “very soon.” Officials in the Pentagon advocate a different approach. […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has promised that Syria, Russia and Iran will pay a price for the latest use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria’s brutal civil war. But if he does decide to carry out punitive strikes for the chemical attack in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma, they will do little to satisfy advocates for a more forceful U.S. involvement on humanitarian grounds. Nor are they likely to deter future outrages, if the missile strike Trump ordered last year after a previous use of chemical weapons is any indication. More importantly, they will leave unresolved the geopolitical […]

On March 27, Japan announced an extensive reorganization of the main branch of its military, known as the Ground Self-Defense Forces. The government described it as the most sweeping revamp since the forces were founded in 1954. The restructuring includes integrating the five regional armies that make up the Ground Self-Defense Forces under a single command. While Japan’s postwar constitution restricted the country’s military capabilities, escalating threats from China and North Korea have raised concerns for Tokyo, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken steps to loosen the constitutional constraints. In an email interview, Michael Green, the senior vice president […]

If you need a break from the tawdry soap opera of American politics and the twists of national security policymaking these days, 2018 provides many milestones that recall actual American greatness, even instilling some hope for its renewal. Last week marked the 70th anniversary of the formal beginning of the Economy Recovery Plan, commonly known as the Marshall Plan. It was not only a financial infusion to jumpstart the struggling economies of Europe torn apart by World War II, but a demonstration of American planning and organization, as well as the role of visionary public and private sector leaders. It […]

After a relatively quiet first year in the White House, President Donald Trump is delivering on his campaign promises to get tough on trade, especially with China. In 2017, the Trump administration launched a number of investigations into foreign trade practices but took little action beyond abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration had negotiated with 11 Pacific Rim countries. Trump also threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement if Canada and Mexico did not bow to his demands to renegotiate the deal. NAFTA talks are still ongoing. But then, in just the first few months […]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility to existing trade deals and his heavy-handed approach to long-standing partnerships has exasperated Latin America. No longer able to depend on smooth relations with Washington, various countries in the region are pursuing other alliances and sources of economic growth. The collection of articles below sheds light on the shifting trade strategies of Latin American leaders as they try to mitigate the danger posed by Trump’s unpredictability. Purchase this special report as a Kindle e-book.Diversifying Portfolios Trump’s Protectionism Has Mexico Looking South to Latin America for Trade For more than a year now, Mexico has been […]

It is no small irony that the Iran nuclear deal painstakingly negotiated by the administration of Barack “No Drama” Obama has become a perfectly designed prop in the collective psychodrama otherwise known as U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump. Thanks to the conditions imposed by the U.S. Congress at the time of its adoption in 2015, the agreement has a built-in cliffhanger every 120 days, when the president must decide whether or not to reimpose unilateral sanctions that were only waived, not lifted, in return for the rigorous constraints placed on Iran’s nuclear program. In a little over a […]

On March 24, a bill requiring the U.S. government to cut financial aid to the Palestinian Authority quietly passed into law as part of the omnibus spending bill signed by President Donald Trump. The new law, known as the Taylor Force Act, is the latest in a series of punitive measures taken by Washington against the Palestinians that are casting a shadow over their bilateral relationship and threatening stability in the Middle East. Ostensibly, the law is directed at a longstanding policy of the Palestinian Authority to provide financial support to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned by Israel. […]

In rapid succession, America’s mercurial commander-in-chief has changed U.S. policy toward two of the world’s most tragic and intractable conflicts. In Afghanistan and Syria, President Donald Trump has simultaneously ramped up U.S. involvement and insisted that America cut its losses and get out. In both cases, it is hard to track the true underlying strategy that would achieve some durable American objectives. Rather, he is approving policy tactics formulated to respond to worsening conditions on the ground and to the advice of his military commanders, who see the larger consequences of security setbacks. First, the facts. It was late last […]