Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech to the Atlantic Council to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The speech focused on the administration’s new agenda for freedom and democracy promotion, seeking a renewed US-European partnership to combat global terrorism, human rights violations, climate change and the spread […]
I have written before about the out-of-balance role of contractors in development and in US foreign policy in general – with the hope that the ongoing QDDR will take a hard look at how much is contracted out, to what sorts of entities and with what kind of alignment with development goals and foreign policy interests. Yesterday, […]
In light of Senator Jim Webb’s trip to Myanmar and former president Bill Clinton’s recent and well publicized visit to North Korea, I thought this report in The Washington Times was interesting. It examines the practice of using “proxy diplomats” to deal with international crises and questions the political implications of using such unofficial agents. […]
Foreign policy has once again returned to the headlines as President Obama continues his decision-making process on Afghanistan and Secretary of State Clinton recently completed a tour of the Middle East. I’d like to call your attention to an interesting report in today’s Washington Post that compares and contrasts the promise and performance of the […]
One of the biggest mistakes any political analyst could make is to read only other political analyses. To do so is limiting in many ways and, more importantly, just downright boring. So, if you want to read something that is insightful and interesting, take a look at Issue 9 of A Public Space, edited by Brian Edwards of Northwestern […]
The U.S. often takes on the role of defending basic freedoms in the world at large. One of the better examples of this is our championing of religious liberty abroad and one of the primary tools we have used to do that is the annual publication of the report on International Religious Freedom by the […]
As you know, President Obama has not yet made a decision on whether to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan and there are any number of reports in the media about his decision-making process. The White House is signaling that President Obama is nearing his decision on Afghan war strategy: White House press secretary […]
The news cycle has moved on and few are talking about President Obama’s Nobel Prize award but the event did prompt me to wonder how the U.S. was doing overall in the prize count. We like to think of the U.S. as producing outstanding achievers in almost every area of human endeavor, but does the […]
Like many people I’ve been fascinated with the news that President Obama has won the Nobel Prize. The story isn’t really dying down at all and it’s dominated chat in the blogosphere. What strikes me most about the coverage of this story is how often commentators link the award committee’s reasoning to notions about the […]
There were two important developments today in the Afghan war effort and the debate about the overall strategy. First, President Obama has received an unofficial copy of General McChrystal’s recommendations. I’m a bit confused about how a general’s recommendations can be considered unofficial when given to a president, but that is what the media is […]
Nicholas Thompson responds in this blog post to Andrew Bacevich’s article in The Washington Post about updating the Cold War doctrine of containment for the war on terrorism. He agrees that here is much in George Kennan’s original idea that could be applied to the present conflict with global jihad while suggesting that the effort […]
In Washington last week I sat down with a group of bloggers to interview two smart and savvy foreign correspondents. The fact that they were women, representing influential media from the Middle East, made their views interesting on several levels. Nadia Bilbassy is a correspondent with MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Co.) and Joyce Karam is […]
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