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Bush did not enter the White House with a mission to promote freedom around the world. As a presidential candidate, he put forward a modest foreign policy agenda that eschewed nation building. The events of September 11, 2001, however, radically jarred his thinking on the nature of international threats and triggered a fundamental reevaluation of his administration’s national security policy that elevated democracy promotion as a central objective of his foreign policy agenda.
When President Vladimir Putin was in Tehran last week, one image from the trip was indelible: Putin meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat in the corner of the sofa. Putin apparently made an offer directly to the supreme leader about a way to move forward in the nuclear standoff. According to the proposal, the six parties negotiating with Iran would pause on seeking sanctions in the United Nations Security Council if Iran would pause on its enrichment program.
Judging by the visit of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates to Moscow last week, the United States and Russia are in a race to dismantle the treaty system that has regulated their security relationship for decades. The Russian side eagerly reminded U.S. counterparts of their promise to cease implementing the Conventional Forces in Europe in early December if NATO did not proceed to ratify the adapted CFE Treaty.
This year marks an important anniversary. In 1807, the Russian Empire and the young American Republic agreed to establish diplomatic relations. Soon after, Russia's first envoy, Alexander Dashkov, arrived in Washington, and John Quincy Adams traveled to St. Petersburg. Since this modest beginning, our relations, at their best and worst, have borne out de Tocqueville's prophecy that America and Russia are "marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe." Today, with the Cold War and immediate post-Soviet transition behind us, we face a new world in which an effective U.S.-Russian relationship is central to addressing many global challenges.
Experts say that greenhouse-gas trading designed under the Kyoto Protocol was an important first step in reducing emissions increasingly linked to climate change. William Chandler, a senior policy analyst for energy and climate, says trading programs have achieved mixed results. Chandler argues that the United Nations should rethink how it implements its trading program to make it more effective.
Today, integration with the West is no longer a goal of Russian foreign policy. Putin instead seeks to balance his and other nations' power against that of the West and the United States in particular, reflecting a fundamental shift in Kremlin thinking about global politics and constituting new potential threats to U.S. influence.
The story of the U.S. relationship with Uzbekistan is a sad one, characterized by misunderstandings and miscues on both sides.
Sufism—a mystical form of Islam that has flourished in the Muslim world for centuries—has enjoyed a strong revival in Central Asia. In this Carnegie Paper, Martha Brill Olcott explores Sufism’s potential to become a political movement in Central Asia by analyzing the movement’s history and current leaders in Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan.
Some issues surrounding the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty deserve new attention. The future of verification and transparency is especially fertile ground and demands attention, given the Bush administration’s preference to see START and its verification protocol go out of force at the end of 2009.
It is obvious that President Putin is building a more autocratic regime, an internal process that has strained Russia’s relations with the West. A new American policy must pursue both a more ambitious bilateral relationship and a more long-term strategy for strengthening Russian civil, political, and economic societies, which ultimately will help push Russia back onto a democratizing path.