For a real example of political forces engaged in the militarization of society, the Russian leadership might consider looking closer to home.
James D.J. Brown
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}Source: Getty
Although the Obama administration’s new diplomatic approach of engagement has filled in obvious gaps in U.S. foreign policy, this coming year will test whether it can produce tangible results.
Source: PBS NewsHour

He withdrew troops from cities in Iraq and increased troops in Afghanistan. He tried to defibrillate the Mideast peace process.
Douglas Paal takes a look at the state of U.S. foreign policy a year into Mr. Obama's term:
Now that a year has passed, "we're starting to enter a kind of crunch period where we're going to find out whether a new diplomatic approach is enough to change the calculations of the actors in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Jerusalem, and in Palestine to a new approach to accommodate the attempts of the Obama administration to make change," said Paal. "That looks less likely to happen than likely, although we might get lucky somewhere -- for example, in Iran. And in Asia, I think we're going to find that some of this will prove to have been a period of reconsolidation of American influence in the region, which is a good thing but not an avenue to solution of a lot of big problems which will persist as they did under the Bush administration."
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
For a real example of political forces engaged in the militarization of society, the Russian leadership might consider looking closer to home.
James D.J. Brown
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