Obama's choices about China, India, Japan and Pakistan loom at least as large as the urgent challenges of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president has outlined the need for the United States to shed burdens abroad to help repair the badly damaged American economy. That means that Obama must settle discarded U.S. burdens -- and power -- across a range of...]]> Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 My fellow Americans,

This is not the speech you expected to hear. But my wordsmiths are tied in knots writing an acceptance speech for the only Nobel Peace Prize ever awarded for making speeches. So I am going to tell you how I really feel about Afghanistan. Which is: steamed.

I want to accomplish three goals tonight without naming them.

First, to let those know-it-alls, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, know one more thing: This is the last big troop increase you get, so make it work.

I am not going down the incrementalist road that wrecked Lyndon Johnson's presidency. This is not July 1965, when Westmoreland jumped the shark of escalation in Vietnam and then...]]> Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Few things are as dangerous in the Middle East as well-intentioned outsiders. They invariably bring unintended consequences upon those they would guide to a better life. Ask Job. Or consider the case of Mahmoud Abbas, whose hurt and fury over foreign meddling has triggered his threat to quit as Palestinian leader.

No one could accuse President Obama or Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa of harboring ill will toward the president of the Palestinian Authority. But their separate worthy initiatives have resulted in pushing Abbas into a political dead end that complicates the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The Obama administration's approach to the Middle East...]]> Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Barack Obama's extended hand was whacked across the knuckles by the leaders of Iran, Syria and assorted other thuggeries last week. But the Obama administration did manage a good demonstration in Burma of how its brand of engagement can and should work.

Kurt Campbell, the State Department's top Asia official, traveled to the isolated military dictatorship to talk with its corrupt junta. But Campbell also insisted on having a highly visible meeting with the leader of the country's democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, and then publicly called on her persecutors to grant her party more freedoms.

This is the balance that has been missing in Obama's outreach to other...]]> Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The aftermath of Afghanistan's elections has been uglier and more consequential than the campaign that preceded the voting. It has become clear that President Hamid Karzai's bid for reelection was tainted by widespread fraud, a development that represents the Obama administration's first significant failure in foreign affairs.

The administration had emphasized that its primary goal was a credible election process, not the victory of any particular candidate or group. President Obama and his aides had sharply urged Karzai publicly and privately to make this vote as close to fair and free as possible in a country at war. Karzai not only disregarded the pressure; he used it to...]]> Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Moammar Gaddafi leaned across the couch and surprised me with the question he posed, squinting as he searched my face for reaction: "Why do you drink poison?"

I could guess where the Libyan dictator was headed but asked him to explain. During a news conference, we had just engaged in a verbal confrontation over terrorism, and he had asked to see me alone -- perhaps, I thought, to articulate his position better, or just to arrest me. "Alcohol," he said through an interpreter. "You people in the West poison yourself with alcohol. You are fools."

That 1973 interview in Tripoli and an even more venomous conversation with Gaddafi 14 years later accustomed me never to be...]]> Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 There is a special, overflowing corner of hell reserved for the policies and practices of just-departed American presidents, and the Obama administration has rushed to toss democracy promotion in Afghanistan onto that sulfurous heap of political oblivion. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai is making it perfectly clear that he does not intend to go along for the ride, quietly or otherwise.

In interviews, statements to Congress and speeches, President Obama and his chief foreign policy aides have distanced themselves from Karzai so effectively that he might as well be on the moon. They do not mince words in accusing him of letting Afghanistan become a "narco-state" rampant with...]]> Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 A new Iraq is emerging from five years of American invasion and occupation, and at first glance it looks distressingly like the old Iraq: Its people are still bound by the barbed wire of suspicion and hatred as much as by any sense of common purpose and history.

But the new Iraq is clearly a nation in ways that the old Iraq -- long considered by experts as an artificial creation that would fly apart under the pressure of outside intervention -- was not. It did not fly apart and has in fact undergone significant, positive mutations as a result of a soon-to-subside U.S. presence.

The provincial elections held a week ago were far from perfect, and personal relationships among the...]]> Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:00:00 -0600 Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was an hour away from visiting the White House, a goal he had chased since taking office four years ago. The welcome from President Bush, no matter how grudging or low-key, would cement the Spanish prime minister's legitimacy as a world leader.

So Zapatero's spirits were high as we talked about the imploding world economy, U.S. problems with Venezuela and the war in Afghanistan. Nothing could dim his hopes that he would now visit 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. fairly often to see Bush's successor and his new best friend forever, Barack Obama.

The two have much in common -- and the president-elect had cleverly gone through each point of similarity in a warm...]]> Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 President Bush has stymied a strong push by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to engage Iran and Cuba more directly in his twilight days of power. Better never than late seems to be Bush's motto in diplomacy. This time he is right.

Rice's initiative to open a U.S. interests section in Tehran, widely reported as imminent for months, was in fact put on indefinite hold by Bush in the summer. A more tentative Cuban outreach, known only to a handful of officials in the administration, has met stronger resistance from the president, according to one opponent of the idea.

Rice's initiatives make sense -- in themselves, and as far as they go. But unfortunately they arrive as too...]]> Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 EVIAN, France -- Looking down on the smoking ruins of the world's stock markets and financial institutions from the Alpine foothills, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took consolation where he could find it last week by celebrating the joys of American decline.

The era of "unipolarity" -- of the United States setting itself up as the "mega-regulator" of world affairs -- has reached a well-deserved end, Medvedev told other leaders with undisguised satisfaction. That failure became indisputable in August, he continued, when the United States was powerless to prevent Georgia from attacking Russian forces and Russia from responding by invading its neighbor.

Dump America Inc. was...]]> Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Russia's new in-your-face "diplomacy" rivals that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on their most hubristic days. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev don't care if you are with them or against them on their invasion of Georgia. They just want you to get out of their way.

Their bare-knuckle approach has two advantages: It defines the stakes and choices of the Georgia crisis for the rest of the world. And it shapes a dominant foreign policy question for the U.S. presidential campaign this autumn.

The question: Should the United States re-arm Georgia, and if so, at what level? That is, does Washington simply replace the U.S. weapons that Russian forces systematically destroyed in...]]> Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:00:00 -0500 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:00:00 -0500 Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:00:00 -0500 Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:00:00 -0500