US Foreign Policy

Think for a minute about the Wakhan Corridor.  You say you’ve never heard of the Wakhan Corridor?  Don’t feel bad, not many people have since it is one of the most remote places on Earth.  Look at a map of Afghanistan; see that long, skinny piece jutting out from the northeast corner reaching over to China, the thing that sort of resembles a giant splinter sticking in the flank of the country?  That is the Wakhan Corridor, a mere ten miles wide in some areas, it is a place that owes its existence to the geopolitical machinations of the 19^th century; created by the British

It’s fair to say that Americans have become accustomed to the steady stream of brutal reports and violent imagery coming out of Mexico as that country fights an ongoing battle against an entrenched network of drug cartels; it’s also why the drug-fueled violence that wracked Jamaica this past week took many by surprise. So far 73 people have died as Jamaican authorities conduct a quasi-military operation in the Tivoli Gardens section of Kingston, homebase of Jamaica’s top drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke.

Last Tuesday, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on whether or not President Barack Obama’s foreign policy signaled America’s decline as the driving force in global affairs: Dan Senor and Mort Zuckerman argued yes; Wesley Clark and Bernard-Henri Levy argued no.

Now, I’m not talking about the seeming inability of print and broadcast news outlets to successfully adapt to newfangled inventions like the Internets and Electronic Mail, but rather their slavish dedication to a peculiar worldview where the Cold War never ended.

For policymakers seeking an entry-point to engage the Middle East in dialogue, there may be an opening created by the apparent disillusionment of many ME societies with both Islamist groups and Muslim leaders.

One of the key initiatives that President Obama announced during the State of the Union address was a freeze on federal spending increases, and one key area of spending he made a point of exempting was the defense budget.   That reminded me of this essay on US military spending by the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow.  He does a fine job of listing the threats the United States faces in the world and our analyzing our ability to meet them, but one statistic jumped out at me: for 2010 the Pentagon budget will be roughly $700 billion, this, Bandow notes, is only a little more than the inf

It’s been just over a week since an earthquake unleashed an epic wave of destruction across Haiti. And even as bodies of both the living and the dead continue to be pulled from the rubble of Port-au-Prince, conservative commentators are already using the tragedy to launch into an attack on foreign development aid programs.

Is the future of international relations being written in the waters off the coast of Somalia?

On Friday, former Senator Bob Dole took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to sound the alarm over Bosnia.  Without American intervention, Dole warns, Bosnia could again be torn apart by its own conflicting internal forces.