With no more elections to contest and no hope of cooperation from a Republican-controlled Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama enters his lame-duck period in office liberated from the domestic political considerations that might have constrained his foreign policy to date. As Nikolas Gvosdev suggested in his WPR column yesterday, Obama seems poised to “go transformational.” To get a sense of what that transformation might or should look like, it helps first to understand what he has tried so far. As Gvosdev noted, Obama’s first term was marked by policy tensions between the irreconcilable positions held by rival factions of his [...]
Editor’s note: This will be Nikolas Gvosdev’s final “Realist Prism” column at World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Nick for the sharply reasoned and rigorous analysis he has offered WPR readers each week for the past six years, as well as for the support he has shown for WPR over that time. We wish him continued success. In November 2008, in my first article for World Politics Review, I asked whether the newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama would govern more as a Wilsonian idealist or as a progressive realist when it came to the [...]
When the United States assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council last month, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the U.S. government’s priority would be to manage the impact of global climate change on the region in cooperation with the other countries that have a major presence in the Arctic. Climate change is certainly an important issue, and one that is having a greater impact in the Arctic than in any other region. But as U.S. officials are aware, the tensions between the United States and Russia could impede their bilateral cooperation on this and other Arctic-related issues. Climate change [...]
