Column Archive

Top Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough told a Washington security conference Sunday that the White House believes its policy toward Iran is working, characterized Obama’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “workman-like” and said Obama’s foreign policy is defined by a clear-eyed pragmatism that is largely nonpartisan and un-ideological. “We are not asking for more time to let negotiations [with Iran] work because we are betting on negotiations,” McDonough told a conference convened by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington think tank. “We are saying something different,” he continued. “We believe the policy we […]

The saga of Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing this past week, is still unfolding. Yet the Obama administration appears to have encountered its own version of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Hungary 1956” moment: the point at which idealistic rhetoric about U.S. support for freedom and democracy collides with the harsh realities of U.S. national interests. As long as Chen was detained in internal exile in the village of Dongshigu, he was an out-of-sight martyr for whom rhetorical support could easily be expressed without too much risk of damaging the larger Sino-American […]

When the global financial crisis erupted in 2007, it seemed liked the ideal moment for the political left to launch a comeback, particularly in Europe. The crisis was a disaster that started in the very heart of capitalism, the banking system, and which triggered massive layoffs, soaring unemployment and painful home foreclosures. In the U.S., the financial crisis helped the left-of-center Barack Obama win the White House. But throughout Europe voters seemed generally disinclined to bring leftist politicians to office. That might be about to change. After several years of the center-right taking the reins in Europe, 2012 could come […]

A few weeks ago, I met a friend from Damascus for coffee. He had just arrived from Syria a few weeks earlier, and I was curious to hear how he was adjusting to life in the United States. We had been talking for about half an hour when our conversation turned back to what my friend had left behind in Syria. And as my neighbors walked by our local coffeeshop en route home from work on a lovely spring day in Washington, my friend related to me in graphic detail how, last summer, he had been arrested, detained and repeatedly […]

News reports indicate that the United States and Russia are close to reaching an agreement that would expand a secure communications channel originally established to avert misunderstandings that might lead to nuclear war to the domain of cyberconflicts. Such confidence-building measures are useful tools given all the uncertainties regarding cyberconflicts as well as the poor prospects of negotiating cybersecurity treaties such as those that already exist for nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional weapons. The Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, created in 1988, has already been extended to exchange information in support of more than a dozen bilateral and multilateral treaties, some […]