After Obama was elected, Der Spiegel, the magazine that serves as the German political barometer, called him the “World President.” But the German disappointment with Obama has been evident in its pages since. The magazine said that he did not deserve to win the 2012 election, and recently ran a cover with Obama’s picture below Kennedy’s, […]
Hopes could hardly be lower for the talks between U.S. and Taliban representatives that are scheduled to begin this week in Doha. A day after announcing they would enter negotiations, the Taliban killed four coalition soldiers in a rocket attack outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, worried that the U.S.-sponsored talks will legitimize his enemies, abruptly cut off […]
If the case of Edward Snowden — the former contractor for the National Security Agency who smuggled classified information out of his workplace and provided it to news organizations — has revealed anything, it is that the U.S. intelligence services made mistakes as they reformed after 9/11 and the Iraq war. Here is how to […]
On June 8, Juan Cole, one of the few true Middle East experts in the US, posted a short entry on hisInformed Comment blog. The title said it all: “We misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the domestic surveillance to be made legal, not to end it”. But domestic surveillance was far from the only Bush policy that Obama has […]
When President Obama met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in California last week, it is doubtful that either leader focused on the growing ties among countries like Singapore, India, South Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps they should have. Burgeoning security cooperation among such nations represents the untold story of a region on the move. Read Here – The […]
To stop Syria’s meltdown and contain its mushrooming threats, the United States should launch a partial military intervention aimed at pushing all sides to the negotiating table, argues Andrew. J. Tabler in Foreign Affairs Creating a no-fly zone sounds good on paper, military officials say, and might help to give a morale boost to the […]
For some 45 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in a deadly embrace of the Cold War. Then, communism lost the war of ideologies, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the two superpowers went in different directions. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how the two countries still seem to be joined at the hip, with the U.S. at times imitating and at times almost […]
Some of America‘s biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency’s recently-exposed “PRISM” and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats […]
Little noticed during last weekend’s milestone summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping was another landmark event: China’s currency hit a record high, reaching almost 6 yuan to the dollar. In recent years, one of the few things Republicans and Democrats could agree upon was that an artificially cheap yuan damaged U.S. exports and stole U.S. jobs. The […]
This style of summitry is in marked contrast to the recent bilateral meetings held between President Obama and his counterparts in Japan, America’s key ally in Asia. From the outset of Obama’s presidency, Japanese prime ministers have made a point of being the first in line among world leaders to meet with him at the […]
looking beyond borders 