CNN just sent out a Breaking News alert about an incident on the Iran-Iraq border. Iranian forces took control of a southern Iraqi oil well on a disputed section of the border on Friday, US and Iraqi officials told AFP. “There has been no violence related to this incident and we trust this will be [...]

Hillary Clinton chewed out a Congolese student for asking what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a public policy issue: ABC’s Kirit Radia: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lost her cool Monday after a Congolese student, speaking through a translator, asked her what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a Chinese trade deal with the Democratic Republic of the [...]

When you have any number of alternatives to choose from and your opponent believes that you might actually exercise any of them, deliberate ambiguity can be a valuable negotiating tool. It preserves your options and may cause your opponent to expend resources he otherwise might not feel the need to. When you don’t have an [...]

This morning there’s an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by three leading Russian intellectuals, urging the Obama Administration not to allow a return to realism in foreign policy between the United States and Russia to become a rubric under which “American experts serve as the “conservators” of Russian authoritarian traditionalism”: MOSCOW — As intellectuals [...]

Stephen Walt repeats the popular lament (and specifically Gareth Porter‘s) that the United States Government employs a ridiculously small number of Pashto speakers and that this negatively impacts us in Afghanstan.   Pat Porter agrees but issues some important caveats: 1) Languages are extremely hard to develop at a sufficient level. Except for the most outrageously [...]

The BBC is reporting that Iran will attend the international conference on Afghanistan to be held next week: Iran has agreed to attend a US-backed international conference on Afghanistan next week, but Washington played down the prospect of a high-profile meeting. While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also due to attend, the state [...]

Anne Applebaum makes a solid point in the Washington Post this morning: Any president can legitimately call for a fresh start in his relations with the world, and none more so than this president, who replaces an unpopular predecessor. Sooner or later, however, Barack Obama will also have to make hard decisions about regimes that [...]

Yesterday was NowrÅ«z, the Iranian New Year’s, a spring holiday whose celebration by Iranian peoples goes back more than 2,500 years. President Obama sent a televised message to the Iranians in recognition of the day: There’s nothing particularly revolutionary or even novel about that. President Bush made a couple of NowrÅ«z messages. Certainly, the tone [...]

Yesterday there was a development on the foreign policy front that I found interesting and I thought I might throw it open for discussion here. During a gathering of NATO foreign ministers Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that Iran be invited to a high-level conference on Afghanistan to be held later this month: BRUSSELS, [...]

Andrew Sullivan is bemused to find himself on Forbes‘ list of “The 25 Most Influential Liberals In The U.S. Media” since he considers himself a conservative.  He posts a reader email that muses on this fact: Did you notice how many people on the list were seemingly chosen not for their writing or their politics, [...]

Barack Obama has been president for more than 24 hours now.  America is once again beloved by one and all.  Hubris and overreach are things of the past, as the inmates of Gitmo have been freed and the troops are all home from Iraq, participating in rebuilding the infrastructure at home.   Or, certainly, change is [...]

I missed President Bush’s farewell address last evening, as I was otherwise detained at the British ambassador’s residence listening to Dr. Henry Kissinger deliver the Atlantic Council’s annual Makins lecture.  It was, I suspect, a good trade. I’ve been blogging up a storm about the speech this morning at New Atlanticist. In “Kissinger: Iran Diplomacy [...]

Dave Schuler’s arguments and his responses to my cross-examination questions highlight three critical failings in his argument. These flaws are his preference for inertia over strategic assessment, overweighing ambiguous evidence that marginally supports his case while ignoring compelling evidence that refutes it, and a failure to account for what might be called “conditions on the [...]

Pat Lang isn’t happy with the signals coming from the nascent Obama Administration about the new administration’s prospective policies with respect to the Middle East: Words can not express my disappointment if this is the foreign policy that the Obama Administration will follow in the Middle East. The “Abdullah Plan” is not a plan. It [...]

In my latest for New Atlanticist, “Preconditions, Preparations, and Posturing,” I argue that Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and perhaps even Nicholas Burns are misreading the now 16-month-old debate over Barack Obama’s pledge to meet “without precondition, during the first year of [his] administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, [...]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has rejected claims that talks with North Korea about dismantling its nuclear program are in trouble, saying that they are “by no means dead”: NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that North Korea’s actions to reactivate its nuclear plant did not mean an [...]

Five former U. S. Secretaries of State have recommended negotiations with Iran to resolve the various issues between that country and ours, particularly Iran’s nuclear development program: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Five former U.S. secretaries of state said on Monday the next American administration should talk to Iran, a foe President George W. Bush has generally [...]

John McCain is taking advantage of Barack Obama’s “foreign vacation” in Hawaii and using the crisis in Georgia to showcase his foreign policy prowess. He’s dispatched his minions, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia.  TPM’s Greg Sargent figures, The idea is to showcase himself as a man of action during a time of international [...]

Georgian forces have been routed and have retreated from their South Ossetia province after being outmatched by the Russians.  Now, many Georgians are wondering where their Western allies are. Tony Halpin for The Times of London: As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America [...]

Israel is taking steps to prepare for a military strike against Iran, Steve Gutkin reports for the AP. Israel is building up its strike capabilities amid growing anxiety over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and appears confident that a military attack would cripple Tehran’s atomic program, even if it can’t destroy it. Such talk could be more [...]

The United States has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Iran since our embassy there was stormed and its staff taken hostage on November 4, 1979.  That may soon change, Ewen MacAskin reports for The Guardian. The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US [...]

John McCain’s secret plan for Iran: kill them with cigarettes. Presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ‘em.” McCain, known for acerbic comments and for sometimes firing [...]

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern. Dave Schuler and will be joining me tonight to talk about diplomacy in Iran, the dumbing of the presidency, the power of Google, and various other topics. Dumbing the Presidency Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Blogs Iranian Nukes [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As previously noted, Admiral Mike Mullen told a gathering at the Atlantic Council that he fears the United States and its allies “will have to deal with Iran in the very near future.” That statement left a lot of room for strategic ambiguity. He removed a bit in a press briefing yesterday, Ann Scott Tyson [...]

During a major foreign policy address yesterday, John McCain talked about his plan to create a League of Democracies. Charles Krauthammer sees a plot to do away with the United Nations: Well, I like the idea of the league of democracies, and only in part because I and others had proposed it about six years [...]

Fidel Casto may have stepped down but the embargo aimed at his ouster is staying put. The Bush administration is ruling out any changes in its Cuba policy — including lifting a five-decade trade embargo — after Fidel Castro’s resignation, deriding his brother and heir apparent, Raul, as “dictator lite.” [...] “They’re the ones who [...]

Fred Thompson has become the latest former 2008 Republican presidential candidate to endorse John McCain. Fred Thompson, the one-time Republican presidential candidate, endorsed Sen. John McCain Friday, calling on the party to “close ranks” behind the presumed nominee. “This is no longer about past preferences or differences. It is about what is best for our [...]

Cheryl Rofer, co-blogger at the diplomacy-oriented blog, WhirledView has initiated an intriguing project: convene a “think tank” of bloggers to discuss the subject of nuclear weapons policy. With North Korea’s apparent test of a nuclear device, the recent uproar in nuclear-armed Pakistan, and the concerns about the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapons development program, [...]

John McCain has received all the key newspaper endorsements for the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, despite being a non-factor in the polls in the former and trailing in the latter. The Des Moines Register backed McCain despite his being in 5th place in their own polls; apparently, they’re not so much trying to [...]

Mike Huckabee and Bill Richardson get their turn at having essays, ostensibly written by them, outlining their foreign policy vision in the pages of Foreign Affairs. I’ve addressed Bill Richardson’s vision, which he’s already outlined in similar essays elsewhere, extensively here and here. Huckabee’s piece, entitled “America’s Priorities in the War on Terror — Islamists, [...]

Yesterday’s release of a National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has, as Steven Lee Meyers points out, dramatically shifted the landscape. Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s [...]

Foreign Affairs has, over the last several issues, had one major Republican and one major Democrat publish an essay under their name outlining the foreign policy agenda they would pursue if elected president. Bill Richardson was either tired of waiting or figured he wouldn’t be asked, so instead published his in the latest issue of [...]

George Friedman has an article at Stratfor on the prospects for a U. S. attack on Iran which I commend to your attention. The article covers a lot of the territory that I have at my place on the subject over the last three years or so and the territory that James has covered here [...]

Karen Hughes has announced that she’s leaving her post as Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Karen Hughes, who led efforts to improve the U.S. image abroad and was one of President Bush’s last remaining advisers from the close circle of Texas aides, will leave the government at the end of the year. [...]

In a conference call with bloggers this morning, Senator John McCain argued that the United States should convene a League of Democracies to get friendly nations to put more severe pressure on Iran. I was able to get in the first question and followed up on this idea, asking whether he was talking about a [...]

America’s greatest journalist, Radley Balko, has an excellent piece on why a Clinton II Presidency would differ very little from the Bush II Presidency. For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush’s aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It’s odd, then, that [...]

Turkey has begun massing troops for what seems an inevitable march toward war with the PKK rebels in northern Iraq. Dozens of Turkish military vehicles loaded with soldiers and heavy weapons rumbled toward the Iraq border on Monday after an ambush by guerrilla Kurds that left eight soldiers missing and killed 12. Iraq’s president said [...]

The United States has, more explicitly than before, called for a Palestinian state. Saying the time is now for a Palestinian state, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday prodded Israel and the Palestinians to agree at a U.S.-sponsored conference this fall on how and when to start formal peace talks. In one of her [...]

Viola Herms Drath sees the dawn of a “New Atlanticism” on the horizon. While rather ironic in light of reports that the Bush Administration is snubbing Britain, it’s an interesting argument. The dawn of a New Alanticism comes as a welcome surprise. After years of benign neglect, European leaders who are energetic and emancipated Atlanticists [...]

Barack Obama has a plan to solve the nuclear issues in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere: have everyone get rid of their nukes. Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of [...]