Column Archive

President Barack Obama is under increasing public pressure to alter his strategy on Iran. Instead of diplomatic engagement with the current regime to end the nuclear stand-off, many feel he should encourage its collapse — or at least its fundamental modification — at the hands of the Green Movement. According to this line of reasoning, it makes no sense for Washington to negotiate with a government that might be on the verge of being overthrown altogether. The risk of the alternative approach, of course, is that Iran might cross the nuclear finish line before the regime has been forced to […]

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — With all eyes on London and the high-profile Afghanistan Conference, a quieter gathering that took place this week in Prague might have shed more light on the opportunities, challenges and uncertainty that lie ahead for the war-torn country. The conference, co-sponsored by the Prague Security Studies Institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, brought together military and civilian practitioners of reconstruction and development work in Afghanistan, ostensibly to discuss the future of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. But the wide-ranging panel discussions also addressed the broader challenges of reconstruction, as well as the urgent need for overcoming […]

Just four months after the world’s navies all but declared victory in their war on Somali pirates, hijackings have spiked. In the span of just one week in early January, sea bandits seized four large commercial vessels off the Somali coast. Captured vessels can be ransomed for several million dollars apiece. Piracy’s dramatic resurgence has accelerated a profound change of heart among the shipping companies whose vessels ply East African waters. No longer content to entrust their safety to naval forces, shippers are mulling the wide adoption of seaborne private soldiers — in a word, mercenaries, either sailing aboard targeted […]

For weeks, U.S. and Russian government representatives have stated that they expect a new nuclear arms control treaty to be signed imminently. Nevertheless, the negotiations continue to drag on. Most recently, U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, visited Moscow on Jan. 22-23 to discuss defense issues with their Russian counterparts. Their interlocutors included the head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and other senior military officials, and members of the Russian team negotiating a replacement to the 1991 Russia-U.S. Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) that […]

It’s taken as gospel by most pundits today that we live in an increasingly dangerous, deadly and unstable world — with Haiti’s horrific earthquake serving as the latest, irrefutable data point. We are told that ours is a planet at perpetual war with itself, locked in a global conflict that is not only cast in civilizational terms, but superimposed over a landscape chock-full of never-ending combat and ever-rising death tolls. The end of the Cold War superpower rivalry, rather than pacifying the world, actually unlocked a Pandora’s box of tribal hatreds. In retrospect, the Cold War has even taken on […]

As the dust settles from the first round of Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections, two things are clear: First, the hero of the Orange Revolution of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, was decisively defeated; and second, both of the run-off contenders, Yuliya Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovych, are likely to follow through on pledges to improve relations with Russia if elected. The last time Ukrainians went to the polls to select a president, the battle between Yushchenko and Yanukovych was portrayed as an apocalyptic clash, presenting a momentous choice for Ukrainians between a bright future with the West and a return to its post-Soviet […]

JERUSALEM — At about 5 p.m. on Jan. 14, a loud blast rang out along the Jordanian road that leads to the main bridge connecting the Hashemite kingdom with its neighbor, Israel. The target of the remote-controlled explosion was a two-car convoy carrying Israeli diplomats posted to Jordan, traveling back to Israel for the weekend. The assassination attempt failed, but it triggered a number of investigations as well as rampant speculation on both sides of the Jordanian-Israeli border. Differing theories point to various possible extremist perpetrators. The most intriguing reports, however, quote insiders in Jordan’s security services who claim that […]

A coalition government formed early last year is seen by many Zimbabweans as the last hope for a country that has long teetered on the edge of open conflict. In February 2009, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party agreed to form a fragile unity government with the Zimbabwe African National Union — Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), the party of long-time autocrat, President Robert Mugabe. The two parties’ power-sharing deal, brokered by the Southern African Development Corporation, was meant to head off potential widespread violence following disputed presidential and parliamentary elections in March 2008. The election, in which Mugabe finished […]

As soon as Google publicly announced on Jan. 12 that it would no longer self-censor its search engine results for Chinese users, observers debated why the company had taken such a surprising decision. Proposed explanations included recognition that Google’s presence in China has not encouraged greater media freedoms, irritation at yet another massive hacking effort by Chinese-based computers, a lack of commercial success in the large but highly competitive Chinese market, and fears about undermining faith in the security of its emerging cloud-computing networks. Now evidence has arisen about why Google executives were so alarmed: The company experienced the nightmare […]

Last week, as part of my company’s investment work in the health care industry, I sat through a marketing pitch from a Chinese manufacturer of low-cost and disposable drug tests, many of which deliver results in mere seconds. They ranged from the familiar home pregnancy tests to sophisticated multi-panel urine screens (for narcotics) — and even included a mouth swab for measuring blood-alcohol levels, the kind you’ll soon be scooping out of a bowl at your favorite bar to check your ability to drive before heading home. The pitch got me thinking about our collective future in this era of […]

In a WPR blog post earlier this week, Judah Grunstein described the “Yemen frenzy” induced by the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing plot as a post-9/11, “Pavlovian response.” But there’s more to the conditioned behavior than just the push for a massive, whole-of-government intervention in a country linked to an attempted domestic terrorist attack, and in which al-Qaida has a presence. A second factor at play is the tendency of the U.S. government — and indeed, of the entire political establishment — to dart from crisis to crisis, pouring time, treasure and resources into responding to the headlines of the […]

JERUSALEM — The Obama administration is working hard to correct the missteps it made in the opening phases of its attempt to mediate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The principal challenge now is persuading the Palestinian side to return to the negotiating table. This challenge emerged, ironically, as the direct result of Washington’s early errors in its quest for peace. The administration is learning from its mistakes and better understanding the nuances of this complicated conflict. And yet, its propensity to make counterproductive moves persists. A recent statement by the U.S. negotiator George Mitchell showed just how easy it […]

As part of its escalating campaign against Islamic terrorists based in Yemen, the U.S. government has expanded efforts to crack down on terrorist financiers in the Middle Eastern country. But the counter-finance approach in Yemen is complicated by the same factors that have stymied similar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extremists operate increasingly cheaply — and what little money they do require, they can often raise without outside help. Yemen is increasingly a terror crossroads. U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 fellow soldiers in a November shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, reportedly had ties to radical Muslim […]

Just 12 days into 2010, Chinese government representatives have already made more than a half-dozen official statements warning the Obama administration against selling additional weapons to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may respond in several ways to the announced sales, with the freezing of Sino-American military relations likely to be one means of retaliation. The Obama administration should accept a temporary suspension to educate Chinese policymakers that the defense dialogue is not something that Beijing can employ as a source of leverage over Washington. The immediate catalyst for Beijing’s anger came on Dec. 23, when the Defense Department […]

Thanks to the recent global financial crisis, we’ve heard much talk about the coming “de-globalization,” defined by some as the reversal of the now decades-long push to further integrate trade among national economies by disintegrating production and spreading its means across the planet to the cheapest sources. In the past, all forms of growing supply chain connectivity could be justified on price, buttressed by just-in-time delivery capacity. But the market woes of the last year-and-a-half supposedly threw all that logic into question. Price risk is one thing, supply risk quite another. Specialization depends on supply: the greater the specialization, the […]

A year ago, Christian Brose penned a provocative article for Foreign Policy entitled “George W. Obama.” In it, the former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice asserted that “Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term” during the 2008 election, rather than the Bush foreign policy of the second term. Moreover, of the latter, he predicted that Obama would “largely continue it.” In large measure, Brose has turned out to be right. Despite the rhetoric of “change we can believe in,” there has been a high degree of continuity between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Take the most […]

President Barack Obama tried his best to avoid it, but the moment has now arrived when he has no choice but to impose new sanctions on Iran. The challenge now is to find the formula that will prove effective in pressuring the regime without undermining Iranian protesters who have risked their lives to demand change. Obama’s commitment to use diplomacy in dealing with Iran became a cornerstone of the foreign policy approach he constructed during his presidential campaign. He vowed to use fair-minded negotiations, a respectful tone, and reasonable arguments to convince the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium in […]