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In late August, after visiting Chinese military facilities, U.S. Admiral Michael Mullen sounded an almost buoyant note about Washington's relations with Beijing. "What I have seen is actions, not just words," Mullen said, praising China's openness. "I consider that to be very positive." But that public warmth seemed to last about as long as a Lindsay Lohan rehab stint.
Experts debate whether keeping troops in Iraq is vital for America’s national interests in the Middle East.
The Iraq war’s monopoly on America’s political energy has now stretched to five years. During what is an eon in a time of fast-moving global change, a number of international security problems have grown into full-blown crises. Unless a major effort is made to reverse current trends, the fissures now spreading across the global nonproliferation regime could easily become the worst of these crises.
It is not China's military that threatens America right now; the U.S. military remains vastly technologically superior to the People's Liberation Army. Rather, it is China's growing long-term defense relationships with other nations that should worry Washington.
China's recent antisatellite test was not a protest against U.S. space policy, but rather, was part of a loftier strategy to combat U.S. military superiority and one that China will not trade away in any arms-control regime.
As political instability continues to plague the Iraqi government, a more inclusive process that includes both groups outside the government inside Iraq and Syria and Iran is needed.
George Perkovich says that among the current problems with North Korea, India, and Iran, Iran is the most important to resolve because the Iranians are trying to defy international opinion and produce a nuclear weapons capability after having been exposed in the act of trying.
While the U.S. and its allies and associates are trying to dissuade Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability, newly declassified documents on U.S.-Taiwan relations during the 1970s show what a successful, mostly secret, campaign against a national nuclear program looks like.
Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas. As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong.
The U.S. plan to sell over $20 billion worth of weaponry to Arab allies, to counter Iran's ascendance, attempts to contain Iran and force it to spend money on an arms race instead of developing its economy, intimidating it into bankruptcy. One major flaw in this plan is its failure recognize that Iran's growing influence is not due to hard power but to its use of soft power and militias.
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