CIA director Leon Panetta is currently engaged in talks in Islamabad, arriving the day after the head of the Pakistani Army, attempted to win back some respect from the Pakistani population by urging the US to divert some of its $3 billion a year aid to ‘help the common man’ while also forcefully re-asserting Pakistan’s sovereignty. These concerns would be heartening if they were not so transparent.
Intervention to stabilize and reconstruct failed, failing, fragile, and even re-orient hostile countries may not be avoidable for the U.S. and also for its E.U. partners. But for intervention to be successful it must be undertaken cautiously, preemptively when possible, and swiftly, with coalitions of willing partners.
The death at US hands of bin Laden eliminates al Qaeda’s most important and recognizable symbol of defiance. With diminished forces, a dead leader, and little relevance to the several struggles engaging Islam globally, al Qaeda has lost its war. We should declare “Mission Accomplished” and return home.
There is a cycle developing in American post Cold War foreign policy that is not very different from a financial investment cycle. First, there is a cautious military action which, if successful, leads quickly to the hubris of distant military interventions, which then produces over-reach and disaster, the bubble and the burst if you will, and finally, the resolve into timidity.
Arguably, the most significant fact in international relations at the beginning of the 21st Century is the gradual emergence of China as a regional and global power, and the relative decline of what can be loosely termed the ‘status quo powers’ and their most powerful member, the US. A number of mini-crises in the South China Sea this year, are sparking concern about China’s rise and the potential for Sino-US conflict.
The news is that Harvard University is allowing the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) back on campus after more than four decades of banishment. The ROTC Program is one of the three main ways the US military acquires officers (the others being Officer Candidate Schools and the military academies, like West Point).
Despised by Bismarck as ’not worth the life of a single German solider’’ and described by Churchill as ‘having too much history to consume’’, the region of the Western Balkans is returning to the agenda. The EU and the USA must step in and show that they are up to this ultimate test of bringing the last remaining non-EU island into the orbit of the Union and NATO.
When the USA overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2003, many hoped that America could repeat its great foreign policy successes of neutralizing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan following World War II. Overthrowing the former permanently moved extraordinarily grave threats to international stability.
Western Europe’s alienation from its own Byzantine roots has done much to perpetuate Cold War divisions in people’s minds, long after they have disappeared from the political map. Ideological competition is not only unnecessary, it is a dead end. Envisioning an integral Europe that includes Russia has proved to be no easy task. It can be made somewhat easier, however, by regarding it as process of mutual rediscovery
Madeleine Bunting wrote a fascinating piece regarding the inclusion of a feminist agenda in US foreign policy (USFP) in the Guardian on January 16, 2011. Fascinating, because it forces me to assess what I think about the success of inculcating a women’s agenda into USFP.
