John Bolton Slams Korea Nuke Deal

John Bolton, President Bush's former UN ambassador, is not at all pleased with last week's deal with North Korea on the nuclear stalemate. With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared ...

North Korea Nukes Breakthrough: A Roadmap for Iran?

The news over the past 48 hours or so about movement in solving the nuclear arms standoff with North Korean has been stunning. Not only is President Bush taking the DPRK off the "state sponsors of terrorism" list but the Kim government has taken major steps to dismantle their program and provide with stringent verification regimes. The administration fully ...

Barack Obama: Unilateralist?

Oliver Kamm makes a rather surprising criticism of Barack Obama: The problem with Obama is that he evinces little interest in the role of America's European allies. There is a paradox here. Obama makes much (as he did in a long essay in Foreign Affairs last year) of the need to "rebuild our ties to our allies in Europe and ...

Americans Favor President Meeting With U.S. Enemies

A new Gallup poll shows that two thirds of Americans "believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are considered enemies of the United States." Lydia Saad, a friend of the family, analyzes this, reasonably enough, in terms of the 2008 election: The issue of using presidential diplomacy with U.S. enemies distinguishes Barack Obama from ...

Two Blogs that Pass in the Night

Yesterday's exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts based on links ...

Obama Proposes New Cuba Policy Before Exiles

Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama further elaborated on his "accidental foreign policy" agenda Friday in a speech before the Cuban American National Foundation, the Cuban exile group that historically has been a bastion of hard-line anti-Castro sentiment. In his remarks, Obama called for a "new strategy" towards Cuba and other Latin American nations and contrasted his position with those of ...

Petraeus: Diplomacy, Not Force, With Iran

David Petraeus says force should be our last option in solving our disputes with Iran. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, President Bush's nominee to lead U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, supports continued U.S. engagement with international and regional partners to find the right mix of diplomatic, economic and military leverage to address the challenges posed by ...

Diplomacy As Coercion

Matt Yglesias points out that most people misuse the term "Soft Power" and seem to think that diplomacy is just a less kinetic coercive tool to be tried before launching air strikes (or something like that). This is just the wrong way to think about it. The aim of diplomacy in this kind of situation is genuine bargaining aimed at ...

New American Arsenal

I attended a briefing today at the National Press Club featuring some board members of the American Security Project promoting what they have dubbed "A New American Arsenal." The bipartisan group, headed by Gary Hart and featuring the likes of John Kerry, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, and several retired flag officers urges a return of a bipartisan foreign ...

U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Bush Era

Fareed Zakaria argues that John McCain's foreign policy would be bellicose whereas Barack Obama's would be conciliatiatory but, as Dave Schuler notes, both are "confrontational" and "interventionist," just with slightly different priorities. Zakaria points to a recent McCain speech: Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes ...