People joke about President Obama’s abilities at eleven-dimensional chess. I think that Obama has a long-term strategy, more understandable than eleven-dimensional chess. I also think that it’s quite different from much of what passes for strategy in political Washington.
Obama came into office in January 2009 with an enormous number of problems facing the country. [...]
China’s meteoric rise to global economic power has come at a dire cost to human rights, says artist Ai Weiwei. While onlookers in the West are dimly aware of the massive relocations, political corruption, widespread worker riots, and environmental disasters that have accompanied China’s astonishing recent growth, Beijing’s control of Chinese media [...]
For Americans following the Israel-Gaza conflict through mainstream television news, Sunday marked a welcome departure from the frequent unbalanced analysis that has long prevented any meaningful understanding of the situation. MSNBC’s Up With Chris devoted a lengthy segment to the conflict with a guest lineup that actually lent itself to an informative and [...]
(Originally posted by openDemocracy, republished under a Creative Commons license)
The US elections are now over, but crucial foreign policy decisions remain on the table. Foreign aid was hardly discussed in the US presidential elections, and neither Romney nor Obama said whether American assistance should still be [...]
Christopher de Bellaigue on why sanctions on Iran have thus far been, and will likely continue to be, a failure:
The assumption is that the more Iranians suffer, the more their leaders will feel the pressure and either change course or be overthrown in a popular uprising. And yet, there is no evidence to suggest [...]
WaPo on the internal response to Mittens’ hasty, ill-conceived late night Libya presser:
By sunrise the next day, it was clear to Romney that they had acted too quickly. The campaign learned that four Americans had been killed in an attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Even to [...]
What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to [...]
Greg Scoblete is rather underwhelmed by GOP attacks on Obama’s Libya record:
[W]hile Republicans have every right to seize on the administration’s dissembling, it’s very hard for me to find a foreign policy criticism here, outside of banal ones (i.e. that U.S. facilities overseas need better security and that public officials shouldn’t lie). Many Republicans [...]
(Originally published by EurasiaNet.org, republished by permission)
The chances of a war erupting between Turkey and Syria appear to be rising. But the heated rhetoric of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government does not seem to be matched by public enthusiasm for conflict.
The escalation in tension follows an incident October [...]
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