Column Archive

The verdict is in: There will be no honeymoon for Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Many analysts were struck by the nonverbal cues in the two leaders’ body language after their first meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, earlier this month. The era of close, warm interpersonal relations between Russian and American presidents, dating back to “Boris and Bill” in the 1990s, has officially come to a close. With both Putin and Obama disinclined to even parrot the motions of friendship before the television cameras, an opportunity beckons to sweep away the “feel good” […]

Just hours after Mohammed Morsi delivered his conciliatory first speech as Egypt’s president-elect, Iran dropped a bombshell: According to a report on Fars, Iran’s semi-official news agency, the new Egyptian leader had told an Iranian reporter that he planned to transform the political landscape of the Middle East. Morsi, Fars reported, was “enthusiastic” about expanding ties with Tehran, aiming to create “a strategic balance” in the region. In addition, the report said, Morsi would “reconsider” the Camp David Accord, Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. The news threatened to puncture Washington’s hopes for a constructive, cooperative relationship with a democratic Egypt […]

On Sunday, an old Army friend sent me a note to let me know that an officer with whom we both served had died in Afghanistan. I first fought in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, so the fact that friends are still fighting and dying there more than 10 years later gave me pause. Despite President Barack Obama’s promise to reverse the neglect of the Afghanistan War that had marked his predecessor’s time in office, most of the United States is eager to forget the war. So it will be interesting to see the reception that greets Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s […]

Yesterday’s NATO meeting on Syria’s downing of a Turkish RF-4 Phantom reconnaissance jet Friday underscores the growing importance of Turkey and NATO for each other. Syria claims that the shooting occurred when an unidentified jet made a low and threatening overflight deep in Syrian territory, while Turkey insists that Syria knew the plane was Turkish, and that it had already left Syrian air space when it was shot down. The Turkish government decided to invoke Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides for urgent consultations if a member state considers its security interests threatened. It did not call […]

The European Union’s solidarity vs. sovereignty game of chicken goes another round this week with the EU Council meeting on June 28, and its key actors are France and Germany. France, and others, are seeking a banking union and ultimately eurobonds; German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants collective oversight on spending beforehand. Who gives in first is the crux of this negotiation, and it boils down to a question of trust. My take on the subject at this stage of the events: Trust Germany — and hope that France does, too. I already explained last week in this column that the […]

The G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, proved to be far from a diplomatic triumph for U.S. President Barack Obama. Coming on the heels of previous lackluster international gatherings this year — the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, the NATO summit in Chicago and the G-8 meeting at Camp David — it raises the question of whether Washington’s ability to lead in the global system has been compromised. Obama has eschewed attending the Rio+20 “Green Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, a wise choice given that the meeting is also not likely to produce any dramatic breakthroughs. Some of the […]

The early weeks of the Arab uprisings of 2011 led many to believe that the fast-spreading protest movements were ushering in a new age of nonviolent democratic change in the region. Not surprisingly, the exuberant and initially successful uprisings were optimistically labeled the “Arab Spring.” Events have since unfolded in a much less utopian fashion. The early chapters, as we now know, represented just one phase of what would become a complicated process, full of detours, bloodshed and Machiavellian maneuvers. More recently, the violence in Syria and the blatantly anti-democratic developments in Egypt have highlighted the sharply different ways in […]

The elections in Egypt are over. Their conclusion marks the passing not only of Egypt’s democratic experiment but also of a grand opportunity to confront larger questions regarding Islam and society. As one of the more able chroniclers of the aborted Egyptian revolution puts it, what started with “one hell of a bang” is ending with a whimper. First, the presidential election’s wide-open first round left voters with two candidates, Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik, who together deflated whatever enthusiasm most Egyptians still had for democracy. Morsi was the second-choice candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization whose popularity in […]

Earlier this month, Leon Panetta became the first U.S. defense secretary to visit Vietnam’s Cam Rahn Bay deepwater port since the end of the Vietnam War. He attended a ceremony at the USNS Richard E. Byrd, a cargo ship operated by a mainly civilian crew under the Navy’s Military Sealift Command, which was undergoing repairs by Vietnamese workers. Speaking on the deck of the ship, Panetta called for more high-level exchanges between the U.S. and Vietnam, as well as enhanced defense cooperation. If Panetta chose to stop in Vietnam for a few days during his nine-day tour of Asia, it […]

Nobody can predict how the coming week will unfold in the aftermath of Greece’s parliamentary elections. Nervousness in politics and markets has been increasing, and a Greek exit from the euro can no longer be excluded as a last resort. One thing is certain, however: Germany — the biggest contributor to the European Union’s rescue umbrella (the European Stability Mechanism) and thus the Greek debt — is losing patience. Germany is increasingly turning a deaf ear to calls that it do more, more quickly, to save the euro. This is especially the case for calls coming from London and Washington, […]

Speaking at the Naval War College’s Current Strategy Forum this week, Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group and author of the recently published “Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World,” argued that we are living through a period of “creative destruction” of the post-World War II global architecture. The problem, however, is that no single state currently possess the necessary preponderance of resources to be able to construct a new global system, as the U.S. was able to do in the aftermath of World War II. This is not to argue that the United States […]

For the revolutionaries who launched the Egyptian uprising, and for voters anxious about their country’s future, the final hours leading up to this weekend’s runoff presidential election in Egypt have become a contest of fears. The euphoria of revolution, that feeling that anything was possible, has been replaced by a searing pressure: the need to decide which is the worse of two bad options. The first round of voting left Egyptians with the choice of Mohammed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmed Shafiq, a former general who played an important role in the regime that revolutionaries sought […]

A few weeks ago, when I started this series of columns on the perils of the special operationalization of U.S. national security policy, I briefly argued that U.S. special operations forces are often not as good as they or their commanders believe them to be. I worried about a young Special Forces officer with six months of Arabic convincing himself he was “Sir Richard Burton in a green beret.” Some of my friends in the U.S. Army Special Forces demanded to know why I was picking on them, while others suggested my own service in the 75th Ranger Regiment explained […]

Despite all the attention given the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Beijing, it is often overlooked that the most powerful military alliance in Eurasia is the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Four of the five Central Asian countries belong to the CSTO, as does Belarus and Armenia. Vladimir Putin’s decision to skip both the G-8 and NATO summits in the U.S. and his choice of Belarus, rather than Europe or China, as the destination for his first official visit following his May 7 inauguration as president demonstrates the importance that he attaches to strengthening Moscow’s influence in the […]

This weekend, Spain followed Greece, Portugal and Ireland in seeking shelter under the European Union’s rescue umbrella in order to save its banks. Spain, perhaps prouder than the others, tried to avoid by all means a government bailout, fighting hard for a solution that would rescue its hard-hit banks directly. The problem for Madrid is that after two years of crisis, the EU has learned how to hook countries up to its bailout lifeline, but nobody knows how to move them off of it. The confession of failure might take a harder toll on the Spanish nation than the formal […]

As international negotiators prepare for the next round of talks with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled in Moscow for June 18-19, the United States faces a 21st century version of a “Stevenson moment.” In 1962, in a forceful presentation backed by compelling photographic evidence at the United Nations, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson made the case that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear weapons in Cuba. In addressing Soviet Ambassador Valentin Zorin in the chamber of the Security Council, Stevenson pointedly declared, “Let me say something to you, Mr. Ambassador. We do have the evidence. We have it, and it is […]

One of the obvious dangers of a possible war with Iran over its controversial nuclear program is that it could push oil prices sharply higher and, in turn, send the global economy into a tailspin. But a number of developments, some very deliberately set in motion by Iran’s adversaries, have recently converged to erode the effectiveness of Iran’s powerful oil weapon. The sharp edge of Iran’s oil power has been dulled through painstaking tactical moves by Washington and its allies, but the most significant change came not by design, but by misfortune. Ironically, the fear that a conflict with Iran […]