Editor’s note: The following is a excerpt of Chapter 9, "Nuclear Thresholds" from the author’s book, Engaging Iran.
Burning the Ships? Iran and the United States
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Bazaar-o World
Name the country in the Middle East that is most anti-American. Egypt? Palestine? Lebanon? Try again. Try instead our key NATO ally, the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and one of the countries in line for membership in the European Union.
Postcard from…Istanbul
As the call to prayers in Istanbul gets louder – thanks to more sophisticated amplifying systems – the number and size of Turkish flags have grown in proportion. This is the fundamental conflict in Turkey today. On one side are the secularists, the heirs of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. On the other side are the Islamists, who are divided into moderate and fundamentalist factions. Since the landslide win of the moderate Islamists in the recent elections, the conflict between religion and politics has sharpened, at least at the symbolic level. In a country where women who wear headscarves are still banned from higher political office, the wife of the new president Abdullah Gul, has broken a taboo by wearing the turban. The army, the institution most committed to secular nationalism, has responded by boycotting the president’s swearing-in ceremony.
Darfur: The Other Anniversary
Xtreme Gulpism
Just as American consumers have guzzled down more and more glucose drip, U.S. executives have also taken a bigger and bigger gulp out of the overall income stream.
Interview with Anya Achtenberg
Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her latest novel, History Artist, grapples with recent Cambodian history. FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller talks to her about fighting against social amnesia and the challenge of inhabiting the lives of others in writing fiction.
Kosovo in the Balance
Like a bad cold that won’t go away, the Kosovo question continues to plague international diplomacy long after it was expected that it would be resolved. If everything had gone according to plan, there would have been agreement by now for a settlement of Kosovo’s status that would have entailed "supervised independence" for the southern Serbian province and a large degree of autonomy for its ethnic Serb population. Instead, the threat of a Russian veto has derailed the Kosovo independence train and Europe is once again facing instability on its doorstep.
Make Your Own Foreign Policy
With the policymakers who have steered our country in the wrong direction absent from Washington, now is the time for YOU to start making US foreign policy.
Memo to the President, 2020
Although we are currently considered revisionist historians, I believe that my End of Empire books definitively establish that the financial crisis that the United States experienced in 2007 was the key element in destroying our position in the world.
60-Second Expert: U.S.-Korea Relations
The United States and North Korea are negotiating a resolution to the current nuclear crisis. Enthusiasm in Washington for regime collapse in Pyongyang has died down. But the United States hasn’t changed its fundamental approach to Northeast Asia.