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22. Europe's Palestine Problem
- Author:
- Rory Miller
- Publication Date:
- 09-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- In the middle of a stalled peace process, one of the few things Israeli and Palestinian officials agree on is that U.S. President Barack Obama deserves much of the blame for the impasse. Israeli policymakers are furious with the demand that Obama made early in his term that Israel freeze settlement construction in the West Bank and with his declaration in May that Israel's 1967 borders should serve as the starting point for peace discussions. Palestinian leaders, for their part, believe that Obama has failed to fulfill the promise he made in his June 2009 Cairo speech to back their legitimate aspirations for statehood, and they are irritated that he has not forced the Israelis to continue the settlement freeze. The recent decisions by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to strike a unity deal with Hamas and press for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood is a sign of how frustrated with Washington he has become. In the face of this impasse, a variety of international figures are now asking Europe to step in. Arab leaders such as former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa have called on Europe to take charge of the peace process. In a May meeting with EU officials, for example, King Abdullah of Jordan urged Europe "to intensify efforts with a view to removing the obstacles that impede the resumption of the peace process." The EU's current political and diplomatic leaders need no encouragement. They already seem to feel that they have both a right and a duty to help solve the conflict. Last year, then French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Miguel Ángel Moratinos, his Spanish counterpart, said in a joint statement that the EU "must play a role because it is a friend of Israel and of the Palestinian Authority [PA] and above all because its own long-term security is at stake."
- Topic:
- Security and United Nations
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and Palestine
23. September 11 in Retrospect
- Publication Date:
- 09-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- It's tempting to see the 9/11 attacks as having fundamentally changed U.S. foreign policy. It's also wrong. The Bush administration may have gone over the top in responding, but its course was less novel than generally believed. A quest for primacy and military supremacy, a readiness to act proactively and unilaterally, and a focus on democracy and free markets -- all are long-standing features of U.S. policy.
- Topic:
- Security and Foreign Policy
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, China, and Middle East
24. Leaving Afghanistan to the Afghans
- Author:
- David M. Rodriguez
- Publication Date:
- 09-2011
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- In the summer of 2011, I visited the Afghan army's Regional Military Training Center in Helmand Province. The recruits had been there for two weeks, and they looked as strong as any group of U.S. soldiers in basic training. The Afghan drill instructors were as competent, and had the same cocky swagger, as American ones. "Sir, look at all of our volunteers," one drill sergeant proudly said to me. "They're great. We have already won. . . . We just don't know it yet." To comprehend the United States' progress in Afghanistan, it is important to understand how and where we have focused our resources and what work lies ahead. To be sure, the United States and its coalition partners still have plenty of challenges left to tackle in Afghanistan. However, there are indisputable gains everywhere we have focused our efforts. In 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of U.S. and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, with the help of David Petraeus, then the commander of the U.S. Central Command, worked hard to design a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign for Afghanistan that would "get the inputs right," as Petraues often said. The upshot was more resources, troops, and civilian support and better command coherence. There are now more Afghan and coalition soldiers in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces alone than there were in all of Regional Command East, the formation responsible for security in Afghanistan's 14 eastern provinces, when I commanded the latter from 2007 to 2008. As 33,000 U.S. troops begin the drawdown, returning to the United States by next summer, 352,000 Afghan soldiers and police will be in place to continue their work. There are clear signs of progress in Afghanistan, and coalition forces have regained the initiative. The strategy has worked because it sought to match the coalition's goals with available resources. It involved four major concepts. First, use a bottom-up approach founded on good governance, capable security forces, and engagement with local communities. If towns had good leaders and security providers, populations would find local solutions to their local problems, with just a little help from Kabul. Insurgents could no longer exploit popular grievances about security, justice, and a lack of basic services.
- Topic:
- Security
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, United States, and America
25. Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East
- Author:
- F. Gregory Gause III
- Publication Date:
- 12-2011
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- There is arguably no more unlikely U.S. ally than Saudi Arabia: monarchical, deeply conservative socially, promoter of an austere and intolerant version of Islam, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. Consequently, there is no U.S. ally less well understood. Many U.S. policymakers assume that the Saudi regime is fragile, despite its remarkable record of domestic stability in the turbulent Middle East. “It is an unstable country in an unstable region,” one congressional staffer said in July 2011. Yet it is the Arab country least affected in its domestic politics by the Arab upheavals of 2011. Many who think it is unstable domestically also paradoxically attribute enormous power to it, to the extent that they depict it as leading a “counterrevolution” against those upheavals throughout the region. 2 One wonders just how “counterrevolutionary” the Saudis are when they have supported the NATO campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi, successfully negotiated the transfer of power from Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and condemned the crackdown on protestors by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and how powerful they are when they could do little to help their ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
- Topic:
- Security, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Islam, Oil, and Bilateral Relations
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Arabia, and Saudi Arabia
26. The Future of NATO
- Author:
- Whitney Shepardson
- Publication Date:
- 02-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did not exist today, the United States would not seek to create it. In 1949, it made sense in the face of a potential Soviet invasion to forge a bond in the North Atlantic area among the United States, Canada, and the west European states. Today, if the United States were starting from scratch in a world of transnational threats, the debate would be over whether to follow liberal and neoconservative calls for an alliance of democracies without regard to geography or to develop a great power concert envisioned by the realists to uphold the current order.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Security, NATO, International Cooperation, International Organization, and International Security
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, Canada, and Soviet Union
27. From the Sun King to Karzai: Lessons for State Building in Afghanistan
- Author:
- Sheri Berman
- Publication Date:
- 03-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- SHERI BERMAN is Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. In December 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama announced the fruits of his administration's lengthy review of Afghanistan policy: temporary troop reinforcements and a new military strategy designed to reverse recent gains by the Taliban, efforts to increase the quality of Afghan governance, and a stronger partnership with Pakistan. The troop increases and the proposed withdrawal starting date of July 2011 dominated the headlines, but in the long run the effects of what Obama called a "civilian surge" will be even more important.
- Topic:
- Security and Governance
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, United States, and Taliban
28. After Iran Gets the Bomb: Containment and Its Complications
- Author:
- Ray Takeyh and James M. Lindsay
- Publication Date:
- 03-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- JAMES M. LINDSAY is Senior Vice President, Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair at the Council on Foreign Relations. RAY TAKEYH is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs.
- Topic:
- Security and Cold War
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, and Iran
29. Helping Others Defend Themselves
- Author:
- Robert M. Gates
- Publication Date:
- 05-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Foreign Affairs
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States' safety and security -- a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack -- are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time.
- Topic:
- Security and Government
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, United States, and Iraq
30. Energy Security An Agenda for Research
- Author:
- Michael A. Levi
- Publication Date:
- 06-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- U.S. policymakers talk more today about energy security than they have at any time since the energy crises of the 1970s. Yet scholarly understanding of the challenges at the intersection of energy and national security, and of the various policy tools available to address them, is surprisingly weak. On April 12–13, 2010, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) convened a group of thirty-six scholars and practitioners to assess the current state of knowledge about oil, gas, and national security, and to identify those areas where research was most needed. Participants included experts from academia, industry, government, and international institutions, and brought backgrounds in economics, political science, international relations, science, engineering, and law to the discussion.
- Topic:
- Security, Climate Change, and Energy Policy
- Political Geography:
- United States