Is Barack Obama another Neville Chamberlain? I’ve been reluctant to make the comparison, but as talks with Iran have unfolded, it’s become impossible not to think of the 1938 Munich conference, where Britain and France agreed that strategically and economically…
The passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about…
President Obama couldn’t resist confiding to a recent interviewer, “I am comfortable with complexity.” In fact, he is comfortable with a kind of pseudo-complexity that lends itself to pseudo-thoughtful formulations. Thus, in his State of the Union address last week…
Executive Summary Amid recent upheaval in the Middle East, American policymakers have often turned to Turkey as an important partner that shared many U.S. interests. This perception of Turkey is based primarily on history. For the half-century of the Cold…
The interim agreement that the United States and its partners cut with Iran last week stands as a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Obama administration has walked away from a core objective of U.S. policy for two…
This month in Geneva, at the first negotiations over its nuclear program since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, Iran took an unprecedented step: It negotiated. For the first time, Tehran presented an actual vision of the endgame for the…
In the midst of media coverage of the government shutdown (it’s the Republicans’ fault!) and the glitch-filled rollout of Obamacare (it’s not Obama’s fault!), Americans may not have noticed the October 1 speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to…
The debate in the United States over policy toward Egypt has become mired in the principle of the democratic process. But the moral issues involved are complicated, and U.S. policy should be guided by our larger strategic interests across the…
Saudi Arabia has never been a true friend of the United States because of its extremist Islamic ideology, but for decades it has been an important ally. We share many important strategic interests. Riyadh is not necessarily a stabilizing force…