A meditation on history and the long arc of justice.
Hope, History, and Unpredictability
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diplomacy
Why Israel Won’t Abide Any Iran Nuclear Accord
With or without nuclear weapons, Iran and its allies are the chief impediments to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
The U.S. Cuba Embargo: Making Diplomacy Impossible
The Obama administration says it wants to improve U.S. ties with Cuba, but its own policies are preventing the country from keeping its diplomatic facilities open.
Iranian Nuclear Deal: Hardliners Despair, Pragmatists Rejoice
The six-month interim agreement between Iran and the P5+1 powers will echo through the decades if it can bring Washington and Tehran in from the cold.
How We Got Here: A History of Missed Opportunities with Iran
Iran has been willing to deal for at least a decade. Why are there still calls for more sanctions?
Congress vs. Obama on Iran
Hardliners in Tehran are not happy with the recent rapprochement between the United States and Iran and the related progress in negotiations to address Western concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. But the bigger threat may come from hardliners in the...
Is Diplomacy, Not War, Finally on the March in the Middle East?
The Middle East is normally a depressing topic of conversation with talk of ongoing wars, repressive governments, ethnic violence, and terrorist attacks. Yet two of the region’s most troublesome challenges (Syria and Iran) are on diplomatic tracks toward peaceful...
Collapsism
When small children want something to go away, they close their eyes. Poof! The monster disappears. The spoonful of spinach vanishes. The spilled milk evaporates. Except that they don’t. U.S policymakers indulge in a similar variety of child’s play called collapsism....
America’s Orphaned Diplomacy
Thanks to some well-timed diplomacy this September, the world narrowly escaped another U.S. intervention in the Middle East. But military action in Syria was not prevented by a professional diplomatic strategy on the part of the Obama administration—that part was...
At the UN, a Latin American Rebellion
Without a doubt, the 68th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy....