Despite two ongoing wars, it was striking that Obama focused so little in his first State of the Union speech on the world outside our borders other than the call to be competitive in the global economy. Indeed, he dedicated only eight minutes of the 70-minute speech to foreign policy.
Much attention has recently been focused on the poverty-stricken country of Yemen.
Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to find Yemen a challenge. And the current $70 million package of military and security assistance is not the first $70 million US aid program to Yemen.
With a proud recorded history stretching back six millennia, Iranians have evolved into staunch nationalists in modern times.
The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.
The latest attempt to highlight the crisis in Gaza captured some media attention. But a failure to balance principle with pragmatism meant that the Gaza Freedom March did not achieve its full potential.
Seven stories of 2009 that deserved more attention than they received.
The real test of President Barack Obama’s dealing with China and Russia will be whether he can persuade them to support U.S. pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons aspirations. Obama is reported to have lobbied China on that issue during his recent visit. He also broached the topic with Russia in the recent past for the same purpose, but with little success. Iran denies wanting to join the nuclear club, but Washington has no faith in those denials.
What needs rewriting is not the Geneva Conventions but Israel’s abusive and illegal war strategy.
It’s bad enough when a person drowns in debt. Shock waves multiply when a corporation teeters on the verge of failure. The economy becomes even more agitated when a country declares bankruptcy, as Iceland did in 2008 and Hungary and Latvia almost did in 2009.