As the US prepares to “withdraw” (sic) from Afghanistan, a fiasco that has made its Soviet “prequel” seem like a Hollywood success story, two new books add insult to injury. Written by a former British ambassador and a Russian journalist, and reviewed by Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books, “Afgantsy: The Russians in […]
Forgive the silence. Mrs. FPA Africa Blog and I gave a trip to southern California to ourselves for our anniversary. We met some good friends and have been enjoying Venice Beach, Santa Monica, and it’s surrounds for the last week or so. There has been a U2 concert and lots of beach time. Tomorrow we […]
In many places — here for instance — news outlets have conflated protests against austerity in Greece with European-wide discontent. This is a mistake. There is discontent in Europe, but what people are unhappy about differs from country to country. More importantly, the problems in these countries, even those on the debt-plagued periphery, do not […]
Since AKP’s unquestionable victory, Washington analysts have finally quit looking at the Turkish poll results and started to ask, how this all will shape Turkey’s future foreign policy? I recently attended an event at the Brookings Institution, where Turkish and American scholars presented their interpretations of post-election Turkey. The event brought together Panelists include Fuat […]
The U.S. and Japan agreed to delay relocation of the U.S. Marine Futenma air station to another location in Okinawa until 2014, at the earliest. The wording of the agreement said the base would be transferred “at the earliest possible date after 2014.” This wording will allow the two countries to put the relocation on […]
The New York Times reported, less than five hours before a scheduled prime time nationally televised speech, that President Obama has indeed decided to drawdown the 30,000 surge troops out of Afghanistan. 10,000 are scheduled to leave Afghanistan by the end of this year; the other 20,000 by summer of 2012-just before the November election. […]
President Barack Obama is due to announce his plan to start pulling U.S troops out of Afghanistan during a televised speech to his American and international audience, his sixth since assuming office in January 2009. This rather militarily dicey and politically expedient move is being made right in the midst of wholesale national security changes in […]
Last week the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security body with a total population of 1.5 billion people, held a 10th anniversary summit in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. The original “Shanghai Five” was formed in 1996 comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In 2001 when Uzbekistan joined the pack, it became […]
The latest Pew Research Center public opinion poll shows that the Pakistani people continue to hold the U.S in astonishingly low regard. However, one sliver of good news, for American interests, is that since the May 2nd Navy Seal operation that captured and killed Osama bin Laden, U.S support in Pakistan has not fallen further: […]
Despite my day job and this Foreign Policy Association endeavor writing on Cuba, sometimes I do not fully appreciate how challenging it actually can be for Americans to gain U.S. government approval to visit the island. Like so many things, one can talk about this issue every day in a broad sense and in so […]
It is a dangerous time to be a fishing trawler in the South China Sea these days. Earlier this month, a Vietnamese vessel searching for oil had a rather unpleasant confrontation with a Chinese fishing boat, resulting in damage to the Vietnamese’s seismic equipment used for exploration purposes. Moreover, just this past week, the administration […]
The death of Andrei Sakharov’s widow, fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner, over the weekend brought out the usual opportunists. In Russia, right wing liberals like Boris Nemtsov immediately swooped down to claim her mantle: “The demise of such a Soviet dissident as Yelena Bonner is a huge loss for our society, which is badly […]
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