North America Archive

Back in January, writing in these pages, I wondered whether the appointment of John Kerry as secretary of state and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense heralded “the third installment of President Barack Obama’s approach to national security,” an Obama Doctrine 3.0 characterized by “retrenchment and rebuilding” rather than intervention. Kerry and Hagel seemed to complement National Security Adviser Tom Donilon’s perspective on foreign affairs; Steve Clemons, back in 2010, had described Donilon as a “realist” and as a “skeptic of many of the military’s grand schemes in which large resources are given [and] big promises made.” Obama’s decision this […]

In a May 23 speech at the National Defense University, President Barack Obama announced a shift in U.S. national security strategy. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington, he noted, the United States “went to war.” After 12 years, al-Qaida has been decimated. Those of its leaders still alive spend more effort hiding than plotting new attacks. The American homeland “is more secure,” the president said. And the United States had ended or is ending large-scale military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism still threatens, Obama argued, but the nature of the threat has changed […]

At this weekend’s Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual International Institute of Strategic Studies Asia Security Summit in Singapore, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered a well-crafted speech that reaffirmed the core tenets of the Obama administration’s Asia Pivot and showed how the Pentagon was still executing the strategy despite budgetary constraints and the departure from the administration of some of the strategy’s key architects. Yet the reactions to the speech from the senior Asian defense officials present made clear that the pivot continues to face serious obstacles. Hagel underscored the United States’ enduring security ties with the Asia-Pacific region in […]

The latest meeting of the leaders of the Pacific Alliance on May 23 in Cali, Colombia, was the best one yet, suggesting that this new economic bloc is an emerging powerhouse in Latin America. The alliance is an effort by Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru to link their economies more closely together through trade, finance and labor market integration to build mutual economic competitiveness. It is one of the most dynamic and potentially significant developments in hemispheric trade relations since negotiations to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) broke down in 2003. In the intervening decade, China’s […]

Last week, operators of the Liberty Reserve currency exchange were indicted for laundering $6 billion. Liberty Reserve was part of a growing industry of online payment systems that allow illegal enterprises, from child pornography to weapons trafficking, to move money within an unregulated system, creating a hub for criminal conduct that is both centralized and global. Explaining that the indictment will serve as a temporary blow to money launderers and others moving money on the boundary of legality, Gurpreet Dhillon, a professor of information security at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Business, told Trend Lines that digital currencies are here […]