The Obama administration has undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief after the pro-western coalition won yesterday’s parliamentary vote in Lebanon. After the president’s big speech about improving relationships between America and the Mid-East, a Hezbollah win in Lebanon would have been seen by many as a strong rebuke to Obama.
Of course, calling the election an [...]

Obama has arrived in Cairo to give a major speech that is expected to focus on improving ties with the Islamic world. One speech alone is obviously not going to be enough. The Islamic world is angry enough with the West that they are unlikely to suddenly forgive us just because the US has a [...]

Well, North Korea has the world’s attention. Exploding a nuclear bomb and launching missile tests will do that. All that’s left now is for the world to respond.
North Korea has long been a foreign policy conundrum, frustrating a long line of U.S. presidents who’ve attempted to stop the so-called hermit nation from threatening its neighbors. [...]

Looks like Iran decided to remind us why we don’t want that nation getting nuclear weaponry:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran test-fired a new advanced missile Wednesday with a range of about 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, southeastern Europe and U.S. bases in the Middle East.
Experts believe Iran is still six to eight years [...]

Usually, when people debate why the conservative movement has hit hard times, they argue about whether Republicans are fiscally conservative enough or whether they are too focused on social issues. Rarely does the third tent pole of modern conservativism get mentioned: the national security conservatives. But that’s the exact group to blame argues Daniel Larison [...]

“I don’t consider him a particularly reliable source of information.”
- Hillary Clinton on Dick Cheney
Washington Post has more on the “Return of Hillary Clinton“
It wasn’t the most stirring defense, but a defense it was, and it served as a reminder of Clinton’s relatively low-profile in the first months of her tenure. To an extent, that [...]

Barack Obama’s handshake with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has managed to upset more than a few observers. Of course, the negative reaction from the right has been so predictable and overblown, there’s been little room for a more reasonable critique of Obama’s performance in Latin America.
Thankfully, Eugene Robinson, writing for the Washington Post has written [...]

(Egypt’s 1973 October War Panorama Museum — NY Times photo)
One of my biggest regrets during my post-college backpacking jaunt through Cairo was that the October 1973 War Panorama Museum was closed.
Like a kid stretching his neck over the fence at a shut-down amusement park, I stared through the iron grates at a sculpture garden decorated [...]

Fred Kaplan has an excellent article in Slate detailing why North Korea is so hard to deal with and how Obama should proceed after the recent missile launch.
Over the last few decades, our policies towards North Korea have seemed to be all talk and no action. We’ve all but wagged our finger off. Kaplan explains [...]

“There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy.”
- Richard Perle talking to a gathering sponsored by National Interest magazine.
WTF?!
Dana Milbank digs through this nonsense…
So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that is widely seen as the cornerstone of neoconservative foreign policy? “My name was on it because I signed up for the [...]

Well, Joe Biden did warn us that our adversaries would challenge Barack Obama if he was elected. Looks like North Korea is doing just that. In a statement released today, the government in Pyongyang said the North is prepared for war against the South and would consider retaliating if the U.S. and South Korea go [...]

The Obama Administration may be trying out a kinder, gentler style of foreign policy, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already put North Korea on notice: test a long-range missile and they can forget about a better relation with the U.S. While in Japan, Clinton responded to North Korea’s assertion the nation has a [...]

When the important matters of our day are all but forgotten, I think the Clintons will still be remembered, if not accurately, then at least as meaningful figures of their time. Inside that couple is a Shakespearean play. Too bad all we have so far is Primary Colors.
As you all know, today marked Hillary Clinton’s [...]

Really the only way to guarantee a ceasefire is to wait until your enemy runs out of bullets. So it’s baffling what the nutcake negotiators from Israel and Hamas are trying to achieve with these “temporary” ceasefire proposals.
The latest scoop from Israel’s Haaretz newspaper:
“Hamas’ Gaza spokesman Ayman Taha, meanwhile, has said recently that Israel [...]

They say that they’ve achieved their goals, but with nearly 1,200 Palestinians dead and the cease fire not actually involving Hamas, I can’t help but think that this is a tenuous peace at best.
From BBC:
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel had achieved its goals and Hamas - which has been firing rockets at Israel - [...]

“Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.”
- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the limits of the phrase “War on Terror”
Here’s more…
The foreign secretary wrote that since 9/11 the phrase “war on terror” had “defined the terrain” when it came to tackling terrorism and that although it had merit, “ultimately, the [...]

But it will happen.
Obama said as much on This Week today:
“I think it’s going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do,” Obama said in an exclusive “This Week” interview with George Stephanopoulos, his [...]

I’ve been pretty harsh on philosophical neo-conservatism over the last year or so. In fact, it’s safe to say that of all the various (actual) political philosophies that form a significant portion of our governing political coalitions, I have consistently held neo-conservatism in by far the most contempt.
And without a doubt, the basic tenets of [...]

“Israel has a special place in each of our hearts. But we recognize that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong. While there is nothing “right” in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing “right” in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the [...]

“One of the mythologies is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president’s influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we [...]