A final deal was reached on Iran’s controversial nuclear program in the early morning hours of July 14 in Vienna, over a decade after talks between Iran and world powers began. “This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change...
To hear Saudi leaders tell it, the primary threat to the kingdom's stability is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Worried over Washington and Tehran’s slowly improving relationship, Riyadh has projected an increasingly militarized and sectarian foreign policy aimed at...
There's something fundamentally wrong with U.S. foreign policy. Despite glimmers of hope — a tentative nuclear agreement with Iran, for one, and a long-overdue thaw with Cuba — we're locked into seemingly irresolvable conflicts in most regions of the world. They range...
After a quarter-century of buzz over global warming, the climate talkers are at it again, doing whatever it is they do. Visitors to the next big climate change summit, in an act of glorious irony, will pack Paris-bound jets flown by Air France — one of the meeting’s...
A final, comprehensive agreement is yet to be drafted and signed, but by all indications negotiators have finally achieved a breakthrough in the decade-and-a-half-long Iranian nuclear negotiations. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) framework agreement,...
At the Center of Public Integrity on nuclear materials, Douglas Birch has written a two-part series on nuclear security in South Africa. In the first, titled “South Africa rebuffs repeated U.S. demands that it relinquish its nuclear explosives,” co-authored with R....
We were nearing the end of dinner when the eminent personage leaned in my direction and began yelling at me. Up to that point, the argument among the five of us at the end of the long table at the restaurant had been heated but at a conversational volume. The fact...
The world of today appears to be a great deal more dangerous than the one that President Obama inherited on taking office in 2009. The Islamic State (ISIS or IS) has remade the map of a large chunk of the Middle East. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is any more stable or...
In bidding farewell to 2014, most of us gave the year a swift kick in the rear end as it exited the calendar. On foreign policy in particular, few people had nice things to say about the recently departed. After all, it was a banner year for all manner of evils. The...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. It's one of the oldest tricks in politics: Talk down expectations to the point that you can meet them. And it played out again in Berlin as 21 countries—including the United...