Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Europe sees the U.S. as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the U.S. sees Europe as spent, unserious and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension.
State-sponsored terror persists because the international community is either silent in the face of it, or restricts its condemnations to actions that are of little or no consequence to the offending party.
It may be time to admit that there will never in fact be a common European foreign and security policy. Long before the crisis over Iraq erupted, momentum towards the creation of such a policy was quietly ebbing away.
The dual enlargement of the West--the expansion of both the NATO alliance and the European Union--is one of the most important and least understood developments in contemporary foreign and security policy.
Major impediments to a unified energy strategy do not come from Russia. The dynamics of interstate relations between Russia, Caspian, and other transit states, and domestic politics in any of these states, decrease the likelihood of any singular, meaningful international energy development strategy.
Beijing provides critical energy and food aid to Pyongyang. Indeed, without Beijing's economic support, conditions in North Korea are likely to deteriorate dramatically. Logically, China ought to be the country the US should court actively to increase the diplomatic pressure on North Korea and reduce the tensions over Pyongyang's dangerous nuclear programmes.
The U.S. faces two contradictory imperatives in the war on terror: on the one hand, it tempts the U.S. to put aside its democratic scruples and seek closer ties with autocracies throughout the Middle East and Asia. On the other hand, the U.S. has increasingly come to believe that it is precisely the lack of democracy in many of these countries that helps breed Islamic extremism.
The whole world is closely paying attention to what the US is doing in Afghanistan, because this is the first experience of a war on terrorism. When the military presence will end is difficult to say. But whatever happens, if we cannot demonstrate to other countries that we are able to finish what we started, than the other countries will think that the US is lacking in diligence and resolve.
If the U.S. succeeds in getting Ukraine to face up to the proliferation threat that its nuclear capabilities still pose, then we might be on the road to restoring the U.S.-Ukrainian bilateral relationship. And if Russia proves to be a good partner in this effort, then it might open up important possibilities for the future. In particular, if this works, then maybe it will work on North Korea.
The Bush Doctrine affirms the legitimacy of a preventive strike and emphasizes the notion that "if you are not with us, you are against us." U.S. foreign policy, therefore, is no longer just about containment or supporting freedom fighters, but about shedding the multilateralism favored by the Clinton administration. Is the Bush Doctrine a sound and effective strategy in the war on terror?