DENVER — Despite optimistic forecasts with Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon in their latest Foreign Affairs piece, Stephen Biddle seems to be parting ways and concluding that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government has no intention of folding in the Sunni Awakening Councils into the Iraqi military.
Just when you thought we had eclipsed Scalito and Billary, you get your choice of Joebama or Obiden. Whichever it is, the two seem like good complements in more than name.
A couple days ago an prominent though irate Kenyan journalist wrote a piece a the Washington Post bemoaning the Russian response to Georgian maneuvers in South Ossetia and suggested that Russia’s “international standing [was] in tatters.
In their article “Wrong on Russia” published today in The National Interest, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett follow a thread I began yesterday on US strategy towards Georgia.
The common thread running through a series of events in the past weeks — from Georgia, to Pakistan, to perhaps parts of Latin America — is one I would term geopolitical stickiness, though unlike the economics term, this is less a natural failure and more one of poor execution and ideological traps getting in the…
Almost a year ago, my colleague Steve Clemons wrote a controversial piece titled “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran” citing the internal political and bureaucratic constraints that held at bay a deliberate attack on Iranian nuclear facilities (but not an “accidental” provocation and ramp-up of tensions).
Mindy Kotler is director of Asia Policy Point, a Washington research center that provides objective information on East Asia to the policy community. Among the many obstacles hindering success at the Six-Party Talks to denuclearlize the Korean peninsula are the ingrained animosities between Japan and South Korea.
Katherine Tiedemann is a Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Nuclear Strategy & Nonproliferation Initiative.
It comes as little surprise that Fred Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, and Jack Keane offer a glowing assessment of the political and security progress in Iraq in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The New Reality in Iraq.
Washington is abuzz with Seymour Hersh’s recent investigative piece which describes how the administration has launched covert operations that could bleed into military operations and provoke wider conflict with Iran.