Column Archive

During his recent visit to Buenos Aires, President Barack Obama enthusiastically embraced Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri, who took office last December promising to overhaul the country’s economy, politics and foreign policy, including its endemic anti-Americanism. Obama appeared eager to endorse Macri’s new approach, and while thousands protested the visit, Obama made a statement that expressed surprisingly lofty ambitions for the new administration in Buenos Aires. “Argentina,” Obama declared, “is re-assuming its traditional leadership role in the region and around the world.” The notion of Argentina becoming a regional leader will strike some as awkward. Latin Americans frequently decry what […]

When it comes to foreign policy and the U.S. presidential campaign, everything seems to have turned upside down this year. Neoconservative, Republican hawks, from Max Boot to Bill Kristol, are apoplectic over the rise of Donald Trump, particularly his lack of ardor for military intervention, his supposed opposition to the Iraq War, and his calls for the U.S to pull back from its global security responsibilities. Some, like Boot, have gone so far as to say they won’t vote for the GOP frontrunner, while others have suggested that Trump’s focus on burden-sharing and having U.S. allies take on more global […]

This week, President Barack Obama and 50 world leaders will convene for the fourth and final time to discuss how to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. This last gathering of the biannual Nuclear Security Summits comes at a particularly poignant moment, given what we know now about the Brussels terrorists’ interest in targeting nuclear facilities. For better or worse, the summits represent a more ad hoc approach to securing nuclear materials in particular, and advancing global cooperation on transnational threats in general. Since 2010, the Obama administration has organized four summits on nuclear security. Driven […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. The first time I heard the German word “zwangsoptimist” was in a meeting to discuss ways to improve how the international system functions. Meaning “someone who feels compelled to be an optimist,” the word not only succinctly sums up my work for and alongside the U.N. over the past 27 years, but could also be a one-word job description for the organization’s next secretary-general. Not everyone sees the world, or the U.N., this way. In his recent op-ed in The New […]

This week, all eyes are focused on the twin bombings in Brussels linked to the self-declared Islamic State. But despite the death toll there, and in the Paris attacks last November, a bigger risk to the world’s stability lurks in East Asia. The Islamic State may no longer be the ‘junior varsity’ of terrorism, as President Barack Obama once referred to the group, but it remains the junior varsity of global threats. North Korea is the varsity, and the danger it poses far exceeds the sociopathic but small-scale killing that the Islamic State can pull off or inspire. Now under […]

The day before Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels, a European Union representative visiting Algiers told Algerian officials that their country is “pivotal” in the fight against terrorism. He also praised Algeria for political changes that he called “an improvement of the situation.” The former is undoubtedly true. The latter was probably just a diplomatic nicety. The “situation” in Algeria remains as murky as ever. An al-Qaida terrorist attack against a gas facility last week prompted foreign firms to pull expatriate workers. Almost simultaneously, a police raid in Brussels targeted an Algerian citizen and member of the so-called Islamic State, in […]

With yet another European city touched by the scourge of jihadi terrorism, the focus of the U.S. presidential campaign quickly turned to the best way to protect America from the same threat. Not surprisingly, the responses of the Democratic and Republican frontrunners could not be more different. Hillary Clinton warned that “terrorists seek to undermine the democratic values that are the foundation of our alliance and our way of life.” She sounded resolute in arguing that “they will never succeed.” The response of Donald Trump, on the other hand, suggests that the terrorists already have. Calling the Brussels attack “just […]

The cynical deal struck between the European Union and Turkey aimed at stemming the flow of refugees into Europe is a sign of desperation. It is flawed on several levels, and is likely to do harm to Europe’s image as a champion of international norms and Western values. Ironically, it will also probably do more harm than good to any hopes Turkey may still harbor for EU membership. But for all its shortcomings, the deal is better than doing nothing, and its effective implementation will help restore Europe’s self-confidence and Turkey’s role as a regional problem-solver. The deal finalized Friday […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. A United Nations Security Council debate can feel like traveling in an airplane at cruising altitude: a quick continental overflight in a rarefied atmosphere, far above the dirty reality of the conflict below. The debate can be driven by factors that may have little to do with what may be happening on the ground. But from time to time, council members come back to earth and get dust on their shoes when they engage in road-trip diplomacy. In January members went […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin dropped a bombshell this week, announcing that he was pulling his military forces out of Syria less than six months after his equally surprising decision to send them there in the first place. While it remains to be seen whether Putin will carry through on his promise, security experts are busily scrambling to figure out his motives. Did he attain what he intended, or is he simply washing his hands of a lost cause? There is agreement, though, on one thing: Putin’s move caught Washington by surprise and at least seemed to once again keep him […]

Something remarkable occurred in Russia last month: Large numbers of people protested openly against the government at a commemoration march for a prominent opposition leader murdered last year. A political demonstration in most countries that claim to be democracies would not be noteworthy, but Russia, under the firm grip of President Vladimir Putin, long ago ceased behaving as one. The march last month recalled the enormous crowds that took to the streets in 2011 and 2012 to demand “free elections” following the ruling party’s victory in parliamentary polls conducted on a sharply uneven playing field. In response to those protests, […]

For as long as Barack Obama has been president, his Republican critics have regularly accused him of being some sort of political radical. After reading the mammoth foreign policy profile of Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, I’m prepared to admit they are correct. Obama is a foreign policy radical, just not just for the reasons they think. What is perhaps most striking about Goldberg’s article and the interviews with Obama included in it is how distinctly Obama stands outside the foreign policy mainstream, and how willing he is to question the most prized of foreign policy sacred cows. […]

The American foreign policy community is abuzz over the remarkable essay by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on President Barack Obama’s legacy. The article provides ample evidence that Obama is a fine conceptual thinker with great insight into the evolution of international politics away from America’s “unipolar moment.” His successors may try to reverse or slow down the trends Obama identifies, but in the long run, they will find themselves following his path. As the remaining months of his presidency reach the single digits, Obama has offered us the first draft of his foreign policy legacy. In a wonderfully rich article […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. Prevention has long been a dirty word at the United Nations: Some member states equate it with interference, and the need for early warning that accompanies it with spying. But in a time of crisis, some think the time has come to reconsider what role the world body should play in stopping conflict before it happens. It is hard to argue against the idea that preventing conflicts from breaking out is better than dealing with their tragic consequences. Take those currently […]

In last week’s column, I discussed two of the four enduring challenges that American strategists face: unrealistic expectations and a ponderous system for strategy formulation. This week’s column will take a look at the other two: the American public’s deep belief in “silver bullets,” and impatience. The American public’s trust in the idea of “silver bullets,” or the existence of a single solution to a complex problem, reflects the ingrained optimism of the American national culture. As children Americans are told that they “can be anything they want” if they try hard enough. While this kind of optimism is demonstrably […]

Colombian peace negotiators and their counterparts from the country’s largest guerrilla group are working against the clock, with less than two weeks remaining before the March 23 deadline for a peace deal set by President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). But while the calendar says peace is only days away, the reality on the ground suggests that reaching a permanent agreement could be more difficult now than it appeared only a few months ago. Colombians, who will ultimately vote on whether or not to accept the final deal, are growing increasingly skeptical […]

Seven years ago, as he prepared to take office, Barack Obama made it clear that when it came to the issue of torture, his inclination was “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Obama clearly believed that torture had taken place under the Bush administration; he declared unequivocally in January 2009 that “waterboarding is torture.” But Obama decided that opening up questions about the practices the Bush administration had authorized could do more harm than good, and would be a distraction from his larger political agenda. To a large degree, he was right. It’s highly unlikely that prosecuting Bush […]