Word: farness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...helm of U.S. foreign policy, an observer could be forgiven for concluding that the presidency is more like taking over the controls of a train than getting behind the wheel of a car. That's because you can't steer a train; you can only determine its speed. So far, the menu of foreign policy challenges, and the Administration's response to each, is remarkably similar at the close of 2009 to what it was at the close...
...reality is far more complex than that snapshot, of course, but a survey of Obama's handling of the main strategic challenges appears to affirm the old Cold War dictum that domestic political partisanship ends at the water's edge...
...that agreement sets a cast-iron deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops. Obama may press for an earlier drawdown to free up resources for Afghanistan, but even if he doesn't, the SOFA requires that all U.S. troops be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraq remains far from stable, and the Obama Administration is working through diplomatic channels to cajole the Iraqis into managing their ethnic and sectarian political struggles, but with the same diminished leverage, and therefore limited effect, of the Bush Administration. The moment in which the U.S. was able to significantly change the outcome...
...Candidate Obama promised to engage with Iran, pointing out that the Bush Administration's policies of setting ultimatums backed by limited sanctions had failed to slow Iran's nuclear program. The Bush team did, of course, reach out discreetly to Tehran during its final year - though Obama made a far more public show in his Persian New Year message, respectfully addressed to the regime. But the turmoil unleashed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested re-election on June 12 prompted the regime to circle the wagons against alleged "Western plots," imperiling hopes for diplomatic rapprochement. Critics may have chided...
...China: Any hawkish ideas that the Bush Administration may have harbored about aggressively "containing" China went down with the U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter off Hainan Island barely two months into the Bush presidency. The resulting standoff reminded both sides that their economic relationship was far too important to allow a little geopolitical competition to get in the way, and that same economic relationship - with an ascendant China now bankrolling much of a trillion-dollar U.S. budget deficit - continues to shape the relationship under Obama. Sure, Obama's realpolitik has seen him refrain from some...