Defense Secretary Robert Gates, much less visible than any other personalities on the Obama national security team roster, is playing the role of “steady hand” on the President’s team.
Greetings to TWN readers. I apologize for being a bit AWOL in last few days as I’ve been absorbing a flood of information on President Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and very involved in some of the back end efforts trying to affect the agenda of the G-20 Summit in London.
(Photo Credit: Army.mil’s photosream) Michael Cohen co-directs the New America Foundation/Privatization of Foreign Policy Initiative. As I’ve written before, I’m not much of a fan of counter-insurgency doctrine and two events over the past several days lend compelling evidence as to why. Quite simply, it’s the politics, stupid.
Katherine Tiedemann is a program associate at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. President Obama has shown his willingness to continue President Bush’s method for combating militancy on the Pakistani side of the Afghan/Pakistan border, ordering CIA-piloted QM-1 Predator drones to strike militant targets in Pakistan approximately once a week since he took office.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy I spoke with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Countdown yesterday evening about Obama’s popularity as he goes into a set of meetings in Europe with world leaders. I’ll be writing more on this later today.
Tonight at approximately 8 pm EST I will be on Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss President Obama’s first major overseas trip, the G-20 Economic Summit as well as the NATO Summit — which will likely focus on the President’s newly released Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy.
Vice President Joe Biden said this week that President Obama had no intention of ending the embargo of Cuba when he attends the Summit of the Americas in mid-April, but as Senator Richard Lugar and his senior staff member, Carl Meacham, outlined in a Senate Foreign Relations Commitee Print on US-Cuba relations, there is a…
This manatee floated up to the surface in one of the canals in Ft. Lauderdale when I was there a week ago. It was a magnificent creature and stayed with us quite a while — sort of posing. Maybe since Spring is upon us, I’ve been more tuned into nature than normal.
Barack Obama is having America up the ante on its investment in rolling back the Taliban and those who follow them in Afghanistan. We are sending more troops and trainers, and are committing to civil reconstruction programs whose outlines are unclear.
This is a fascinating session with Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf and former Clinton administration National Economic Adviser to the President and UC Berkeley Haas Business School Professor of Global Management Laura Tyson.
