Column Archive

Despite all the uproar generated by President Barack Obama’s open-mike comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the nuclear summit in Seoul, no one should be shocked that election-year calculations play a major role in international politics. It is perfectly understandable that, in gearing up for what will be a tough and challenging re-election campaign, Obama would prefer not to have to deal with crises now if they can be postponed until after the ballots have been cast. This same logic has driven efforts to persuade Israel not to launch a strike on Iran, which might have immediate and drastic […]

The Egyptian activists whose protests brought down the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 are becoming increasingly alarmed as their dream of a liberal, secular and egalitarian democracy in Egypt is starting to look unattainable. In a severe blow to their hopes, Islamist members of parliament brazenly staked out a large majority of the positions in the newly chosen constitutional assembly, all but ensuring that the fundamental law of the land will be written by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the more radical Salafists, with only minimal, easily discardable input from other sectors of society. By a conservative […]

As Israel contemplates military action to retard the development of Iran’s nuclear program, U.S. and Arab policymakers are trying to determine the second- and third-order effects that such a strike would have on the region. A recent exercise by U.S. Central Command has raised concerns among U.S. policymakers that an Israeli strike on Iran would do serious damage to U.S. interests in the region in particular, but analysts must remain humble about what we can really know with certainty about such contingencies. Both Iranian and Israeli intentions are unclear, and the United States and its allies have remarkably poor political […]

The largest number of world leaders to visit South Korea in the country’s history are in Seoul for the March 26-27 Nuclear Security Summit. The delegations from the 54 countries and four international organizations that are participating include some 45 heads of state, with deputy prime ministers or foreign ministers representing the rest. The main objective of this week’s summit is to prevent nonstate actors, including terrorists and criminals, from acquiring dangerous nuclear materials, as the greatest obstacle to nuclear terrorism is not designing a weapon, concocting a plot or recruiting volunteers willing to suffer martyrdom — it is acquiring […]

President Barack Obama has presented himself as the ender of wars. Moreover, where the preceding administration went heavy with its military power, the Obama administration goes laparoscopically light. And as if to culminate a quarter-century trend of U.S. military interventions that have all somehow devolved into manhunts of some sort, America now simply skips the intervention and gets straight to hunting down and killing bad guys. We stand our ground, as it were, on a global scale. Give us the wrong gesture, look, attitude or perceived intention, and wham! One of ours might kill one of yours — in a […]

The Obama administration’s national security team must walk a very delicate tightrope on Iran policy in the weeks to come. On the one hand, it must convince doubters in Iran, Israel and the U.S. Congress that the administration is prepared to use force if necessary to stop Iran from mastering the technologies needed to construct nuclear weapons. If the different factions within the Islamic Republic are not convinced that President Barack Obama is prepared to pull the proverbial trigger, they have no incentive to return to the negotiating table. And if the U.S. commitment to accept the use of force […]

In the run-up to Russia’s March 4 presidential election, with opposition forces staging massive protests, Vladimir Putin sharply escalated the intensity of his anti-American and anti-Western rhetoric. His accusations of U.S. interference in Russian affairs and portrayal of America as an enemy of Russia brought back memories of the Cold War, raising the specter that Moscow would become an unmovable obstacle in the path of many of Washington’s foreign policy objectives. The concern carried particular weight at a time when the U.S. and its allies are trying to muster a united front to stop Iran’s nuclear program and to bring […]

Last week, while in Poland to deliver a series of lectures on defense issues, I traveled by train from Warsaw to Krakow and was reminded why Norman Davies titled his magisterial history of the country, “God’s Playground.” Aside from the Great Plains of North America, one would be hard-pressed to find terrain better suited to armored and cavalry warfare — and more inviting to invaders on all sides. So it was no surprise that during my visit, many of the questions I heard from Poles concerned the health and future of the NATO alliance. Americans are fortunate enough to no […]

For the past few years, the Russian government has made the unprecedented decision to purchase expensive Western military equipment, in part to fill gaps in Russian defense capabilities, but also to use the threat of foreign competition to induce Russia’s military industrial complex to modernize its means of production and contain its costs. The most well-known such purchase was the signing in June 2011 of a $1.7 billion contract to buy two French-built Mistral class amphibious assault ships for the Russian navy, with the option to negotiate the purchase of two additional Mistral class ships that would be manufactured in […]

When Robert Zoellick recently announced that he won’t seek a second term as president of the World Bank, representatives of numerous emerging-market countries issued a flood of statements decrying America’s 66-year lock on the position. Meanwhile, the Chinese went out of their way within the organization to express their firm desire to have a commanding say in who succeeds Zoellick. Insiders are predicting that an American will still win the spot and that the Chinese simply want to exercise a showy veto over the proceedings. That would be too bad, because there are a host of good reasons why Washington […]

In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, before the Iraqi insurgency had come to define the conflict, one of the Democratic Party’s loudest criticisms of the Bush administration was that it had utterly bungled the diplomatic angle in the run-up to the war: President George W. Bush had been unable to replicate his father’s success in getting the United Nations to pass a catch-all resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to ensure that Iraq was disarmed. Nor had he been able to get a major regional security organization to endorse military action after efforts at the U.N. Security Council […]

If you’re looking for a good example of an oxymoron, or at the very least of a counterintuitive situation, nothing works better than the famed “resource curse.” The idea that great natural wealth might in fact contribute to keeping a country poor has captured the public imagination precisely because it helps explain a phenomenon that is one of the great paradoxes of our time: Countries blessed with fabulous riches are often also cursed, perhaps inevitably, with grinding poverty. But the phenomenon with the catchy title deserves a closer, critical look, because recent evidence suggests that the potion for breaking the […]

It is still too soon to tell what effect, if any, Sunday’s appalling massacre of 16 innocent civilians by a U.S. soldier will have on the war in Afghanistan or on the relationship between the United States and the government of Afghanistan. This apparent war crime arrives fast on the heels of the infamous Quran burning incident that led to both riots across Afghanistan as well as the murder of several U.S. servicemen by the Afghans they were meant to be advising. Taken cumulatively, these events lead many to conclude that the U.S. and allied war in Afghanistan has reached […]

A major Indian trade mission is in Iran seeking to exploit Tehran’s increasing diplomatic and commercial isolation to rectify India’s trade imbalance with Iran. But while Indian companies are understandably eager to take advantage of the resulting commercial opportunities, the Indian government must soothe U.S., Israeli and European concerns that Indian firms will simply undercut international sanctions against Iran by “backfilling” Western companies currently departing the country. India’s behavior highlights a major problem with the Iran sanctions regime: Many countries face a different set of calculations with regard to Iran than the United States, Israel and the European and Persian […]

As someone who thinks long and hard about global futures, I participate in a lot of professional forums where experts discuss the growing complexity of this world and question the ability of existing political systems, both democratic and authoritarian, to handle it. Some professionals, like Thomas Homer-Dixon, fret about an “ingenuity gap,” while regular readers of this column can attest to my frequent accusation that today’s political leaders lack “strategic imagination.” In short, we’re all arguing that politics isn’t keeping up with economics, much less technology. And it scares us. Things get more depressing when the subject of future generations […]

Many commentators are predicting that with Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in Russia, the improvement in relations between Moscow and Washington that occurred under the stewardship of U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will come to an end. Some are even forecasting a return to a more confrontational period in U.S.-Russia relations, given Putin’s history of negative comments about the United States. After all, last August, the then-Russian prime minister and now president-elect castigated Americans for “living like parasites off the global economy.” And in a pre-election essay published in Moskovskiye Novosti last month, Putin lambasted […]

Washington’s successful efforts to kill top al-Qaida leaders, combined with the emergence of strong pro-democracy movements in the Muslim world, have led many to conclude that al-Qaida is fizzling out. But while the conventional wisdom increasingly portrays the group as becoming gradually but steadily a spent and irrelevant force, there is evidence that this optimistic conclusion is grossly premature. Judging by the mayhem and death toll the group is inflicting in several countries — including hundreds killed by its militants in just the past few days — al-Qaida appears to be catching a second wind. The dramatic Navy Seal operation […]