Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
With all the turmoil surrounding the failure to find stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, it is time to return to first principles, and to ask the question: Was it right to go to war?
The coming years will witness the creation of new political structures and parties on the liberal and leftist flanks in Russia. A "total re-arranging of the old political blocs" is in progress. Expelling Russia from international groups such as the G-8 to encourage domestic change is a bad idea, because "totalitarian, authoritarian regimes flourish in isolation."
The Taliban are regrouping in the lawless tribal region in the Afghan-Pakistan border. Poor strategy in Afghanistan is partly to blame but a key part of the problem is Pakistan. U.S. support for Musharraf who has helped capture most Al-Qaeda operatives, has meant that jihadi terrorists which the regime employs against India have been ignored. This will aggravate the problems in Afghanistan.
Given the centrality of the Taiwan issue in U.S.-China relations, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported democracy and freedom for Taiwan while maintaining a stable and cooperative relationship with China. When American policy loses its balance, the Washington-Beijing-Taipei triangular relationship begins to come apart, to the detriment of all.
The Carnegie Endowment hosted a panel discussion to discuss the implications of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze's resignation on political stability in Georgia, as well as neighboring countries, and on Georgia's foreign policy.
Current US strategy in the "war on terrorism" is a kind of zombie. It has been killed, slowly and painfully, by the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency of recent months. Its rotting corpse still walks around as if alive but as time goes by more and more bits are going to fall off. The question for uncommitted European governments is whether they should join this spectacle.
The Bush and Putin administrations have misleadingly folded Chechnya into the global war on terror. Their critics have done little better by defining Chechnya as a human rights challenge. However, ignoring Chechnya or focusing primarily on human rights misses the larger issue, which is not what happens to Chechnya, but what kind of Russia emerges from that forgotten war.
Prospects for cooperation between the United States and Russia remain high. The U.S. Senate/Russian Council of Federations working group is an important step in realizing certain goals of cooperation.
Trenin and Malashenko examine the implications of the war with Chechnya for Russia's post-Soviet evolution. Considering Chechnya's impact on Russia's military, domestic politics, foreign policy, and ethnic relations, the authors contend that the Chechen factor must be addressed before Russia can continue its development.
The challenge of building democratic societies in Central Asia is becoming more profound with each passing year, and unfortunately there are no easy answers to the question of how to alter this situation.