Foreign Policy

In Hillary Clinton’s first major foreign policy address as secretary of state, she made the case for changes in how the Obama administration’s national security agenda will be carried out.

Huge piece from Barbara Slavin of The Washington Times. Before the June 12 election, President Obama wrote a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, delivered through the United States’ cut-out in the Swiss embassy in Tehran, about possible ways to reduce U.S.-Iranian tensions:
An Iranian with knowledge of the overture, however, told The Washington [...]

This post is going to get filled, really fast, with irresponsible speculation. So let’s have some fun.
This Washington Post story about the Washington debate over Iran is revealing for two reasons. First, the administration doesn’t seem to be phased by Manichean, inwardly focused arguments through analogy about why President Obama needs to intercede, rhetorically, into [...]

I’m something like 90 percent on board with Chris Brose’s proposals for a U.S. agenda toward the Iranian opposition.
Let’s demand that foreign journalists in Iran be free to report on events, not confined to their bureaus or have their press credentials revoked. Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and [...]

As reports of political violence in Iran intensified after Friday’s fiercely disputed election, the Obama administration insisted that it would not interfere with the struggle for power between regime-backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the thousands of demonstrators who contend the election was stolen.

At the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative conference, Retired Lt. Col. John Nagl took a question on whether the United States has a horse in the Afghan presidential election. Nagl offered that Afghan voters had “good options” including and apart from President Hamid Karzai. Two important factors were that the president would see the benefits of [...]

I’m at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington for “Afghanistan: Planning for Success,” the first conference put on by the Foreign Policy Initiative, the new neoconservative think tank/messaging operation. Before the first panel kicked off, FPI directors Bill Kristol, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan milled around in the hall, near the breakfast table, along with Cliff [...]

In the post-9/11 era the GOP defined itself on national security and foreign policy.

Top officials from Kabul, Islamabad hope to have a say in the Obama administration’s new blend of diplomatic, developmental and military approaches for the two countries.

As kind of a coda to the non-ambassador-to-Iraq-Tony-Zinni episode, I speculated at first about the optics of placing two generals — Zinni and Karl Eikenberry — in the all-important ambassadorships of Iraq and Afghanistan. Laura Rozen got at that in her Zinni post as well, and now a friend, stationed abroad in the Foreign Service, [...]