Committing the United States and Russia "to achieving a nuclear free world," Presidents Obama and Medvedev issued a joint statement breathtaking in its positive tone. It marks an astonishing shift from the hostile policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations and offers new hope to a world weary of the endless nuclear arms race. Their statement concludes:
It has been 10 years since the U.S.-led war on Yugoslavia. For many leading Democrats, including some in top positions in the Obama administration, it was a "good" war, in contrast to the Bush administration’s "bad" war on Iraq. And though the suffering and instability unleashed by the 1999 NATO military campaign wasn’t as horrific as the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years later, the war was nevertheless unnecessary and illegal, and its political consequences are far from settled.
As part of our strategic dialogue on Yugoslavia, Ed Herman and John Feffer contributed two viewpoints on the atrocities committed in that region 10 years ago. Here are their responses.
NATO’s 60th anniversary summit comes at a time when the Atlantic alliance is struggling with its mission in Afghanistan, as well as with ongoing questions about its overall purpose in the post-Cold War world. The meeting will formally kick off what’s expected to be a two-year review of the alliance’s Strategic Concept (SC). Integral to this strategic discussion will be the question of what role nuclear weapons should play. Current doctrine calls them essential to security and the alliance itself. But leaders from key countries in the alliance, most notably from the United States and the United Kingdom, have called this certainty into question. This article will review reasons why NATO should change its nuclear doctrine, the obstacles such a change would face, and two guidelines for what that change should involve.
It hasn’t taken long at all for the Obama administration’s honeymoon with Europe to wear thin. The handling of the global economic crisis was the first breach. And directly on the heels of the G20 summit will come NATO’s 60th anniversary summit at a time when there is no consensus at all — even within Europe — about what should happen with the beaten-up Atlantic Alliance. Everyone seems to agree, though, that the alliance is in crisis — and maybe even in its death throes. But while the Europeans seem to be thinking about collective security with open minds, the Americans simply repeat the mantra that NATO must be and that more NATO is better than less.
Barack Obama’s rise to the U.S. presidency has left most Latin Americans suspended between skepticism and hope. That’s bound to make the V Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, to be held on April 18 and 19, especially interesting.
There is a new acronym in the lexicon of Obama administration national security moguls. "AfPak" stands for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The term denotes the administration’s desire to take a unified approach to policy and strategy for these two countries. President Barack Obama correctly views them as the central front of the war on terrorism and — also accurately — sees so many aspects of the strategic problem of the Afghan war playing out in both countries that it is far more useful to consider them intertwined.
There was much fanfare as President Barack Obama announced the eagerly anticipated "AfPak" policy review, what the White House terms is "a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." Many have argued, however, that the new AfPak policy is very much a continuation of the old policy with a few tactical grafts from the occupation of Iraq.
The leaders of the G20 will meet on April 2 in London. One item on their agenda will be to consider enhancing the International Monetary Fund’s role in international financial governance. This can only be successfully achieved if the IMF undergoes substantial reforms that require either difficult political compromises or amendments to the Fund’s Articles of Agreement, the formal international treaty that created the IMF and that has only been amended three times since the organization’s inception in 1946.
It’s official. President Barack Obama now fully owns the war in Afghanistan. Standing alongside his military advisors and in front of the Washington press corps, he outlined a plan with “a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” While the goal and the five objectives to meet this goal are clear, they’re also unattainable and will likely result in the U.S. (and NATO) being trapped in the region for decades to come.