Former law professor Barack Obama went into surprising depth on issues of war and peace during his fifth State of the Union address. Here’s how he should grade himself.
SOTU: Obama Grades His Foreign Policy
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Syria
Foreign Policy Thin-Sliced (1/24)
Syria is Iran’s Vietnam; Burma’s former head still pulls strings.
Will Discovery of Torture Trove Weaken Syria’s Hand at Geneva II?
Syrian President Assad can’t be happy about the images and documents of systematic torture and killing smuggled out on the eve of peace talks.
Ten Good Things about 2013
2013 had its fair share of bad news, but it was also a year of extraordinary activism.
Is Assad Really a Master Strategist?
Did Syria President Bashar al-Assad really anticipate that atrocities would prevent rather than prompt intervention by the West?
Mother Agnes-Mariam Warns That Islamic Extremists Undermine Peace Prospects in Syria
Mother Agnes-Mariam’s analysis of conditions on the ground in Syria is far more nuanced than those of the mainstream media in the United States.
Seeing Past “Death to America”: A Conversation with Hooman Majd
Iranian-American author Hooman Majd says that Americans are starting to see Iran as more than “just a bunch of crazy mullahs shouting ‘Death to America’ all the time.”
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...
The Nobel Committee’s Rebuke to Washington’s Unilateralism
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), one of the most effective instruments for international arms control, sends an important message to those who have insisted that unilateral military action is the...
Foreign Policy Thin-Sliced (10/9)
Sanctions Represent a Failure of Imagination Why pass new sanctions that will drain Iran’s moderates of domestic political capital, slam shut the window for what may be the last best chance to constrain Iran’s nuclear program through diplomacy, and risk shattering...