Council on Foreign Relations

Rajan Menon in the Council on Foreign Relations | 'Solving the Crisis in the Caucasus'

Communications — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:20:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...As global leaders scramble to find a solution, CFR.org asked five regional experts what must be done to end the violence and create a climate where lasting peace can be nurtured...

Rajan Menon, Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations, Lehigh University; Fellow, New America Foundation:

Like it or not, the balance of forces decisively favors Russia (IHT). Feel-good ultimatums from us will merely increase Russia’s intransigence. And lofty rhetoric with implied promises to Georgia that we cannot keep will only erode our credibility, further weakening Georgia’s position. As to specific steps, we should:

Coordinate efforts with the EU to craft a strategy for ensuring that a permanent cease-fire agreement provides for a demilitarized South Ossetia. Russia won’t allow Georgian troops back into the enclave in any event, but with the alleged Georgian “threat” to its client removed, there is an opening to push for the withdrawal of Russian forces.

Work with the EU to persuade Russia and the South Ossetians to accept neutral, third-party peacekeepers in South Ossetia. Those deployed there since the early 1990s hail from these three countries. Georgia has never seen them as neutral—and certainly won’t after this war. Given the current animosity between Washington and Moscow, the U.S. (short on troops in any event) should let EU or UN forces handle peacekeeping... LINK to full interview

Peter Bergen in Council on Foreign Relations | 'Are We Winning the War on Terror?'

Communications — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:49:00 -0400

New America in the News:
...Other defectors from the jihadist ranks include the Saudi religious scholar Sheikh Salman al-Oudah, who according to Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank is “considered one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that swept through Saudi Arabia in the 80’s,” and whose sermons “helped turn bin Laden against the United States...” LINK

Peter Bergen in Council of Foreign Relations | 'U.S-Pakistan Military Cooperation'

Communications — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:10:00 -0400

New America in the News:
...Yet longtime observers of the delicate partnership say events in 2008—like the June air strike and Pakistan's February elections—have increased tensions and strained the alliance. "One could say it's on a downward trajectory," says Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistani journalist and author of Crossed Swords, a history of the Pakistani military. "However, it's not irreconcilable differences in my view. This is something that can be resolved … bearing in mind the talks should come directly from the U.S. to Pakistan—not publicly, and not by Afghanistan." Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, says Washington can do more to heal the relationship and increase Pakistan's counterterrorism capabilities...

Council on Foreign Relations Interviews Flynt Leverett

Communications — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:53:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Flynt Leverett, who was a counterterrorism analyst on the Policy Planning Council in Colin Powell’s State Department, and senior director for Middle East affairs from 2002 to 2003 on the National Security Council, says the United States’ standing in the Middle East has fallen sharply because of the perception in the region that the United States is now “an occupier.” He says this started after the first Gulf War when U.S. forces were based in Saudi Arabia, and persists because of the Iraq war. He says the “formula” for ending this is to promote stability in the area, including a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, and to be willing to hold comprehensive talks with all the parties in the region with everything on the table.

Q: The United States is held in very low esteem in the Middle East these days according to every conceivable poll. What’s caused this?

Mr. Leverett: A principal reason for the decline in America’s perceived standing in the region stems from the war on terror, which had very substantial support in the region, and internationally as well, when it was launched. But when we shifted course from a fairly directed campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan and moved to Iraq, we lost a significant measure of support in the region. The way the Iraq war unfolded, with a prolonged U.S. occupation coming in the aftermath of the war, seriously hurt the United States in the region, and is really the principal grievance. It is the perception of occupation, and at this point, remarkably, the grievance is not occupation of Palestinians by Israelis, or other Arabs by Israelis, it is occupation by the United States.

This grievance did not begin immediately in the post-9/11 period, but is a problem we have faced ever since the first Gulf War, when, rather than revert to the “over the horizon” military posture from which we had fought the first Gulf War, we made a commitment to keeping significant numbers of forces on the ground in Saudi Arabia and in other places in the Gulf region. That began to create this sense of America as occupier.

Once we went into Iraq—and we are now into the fourth year, of a seemingly very open-ended occupation of a major Arab state—the perception of the United States as occupier has gone through the roof. That’s a very important reason for the decline in American standing.

Q: The U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was started in the Clinton administration, so you are saying both parties are responsible for the decline in American popularity?

Mr. Leverett: The extent of the mistakes that have been made by this administration certainly exceeds that of its predecessors, but the Clinton administration made many of the same mistakes. Not going back to an over-the-horizon posture in the 1990s was a fundamental mistake. ...

Flynt Leverett is a Senior Fellow with New America Foundation and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project. For the complete article, please visit the Council on Foreign Relations website.

Sen. Clinton Lauds Anatol Lieven's 'Ethical Realism' in CFR Speech

Communications — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:11:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In an Oct. 31 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) spoke approvingly of Ethical Realism -- the new book by New America's Anatol Lieven and former Heritage Foundation scholar John Hulsman. An excerpt of Clinton's speech follows:

At our best, Americans have always lived in a creative tension between idealism and realism; between our clear-eyed insistence on seeing the world as it actually is and our deeply held desire to remake the world as it ought to be. This administration has abandoned that tension for a simplistic division of the world into good and evil. They refuse to talk to anyone on the evil side. And some have called that idealistic. I call it dangerously unrealistic. At the end of the day, you have to question whether this administration has led with our values or used our values as a cloak to justify its ideology and unilateralism. Something is wrong when our pursuit of idealistic goals has turned a good portion of the world against us.
Earlier this year, a progressive and conservative, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, wrote a book together called Ethical Realism. You don't have to accept all of their policy proposals to learn something from the common ground they found. They remind us of a time when America's leading Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, cautioned us against believing that God was on our side; of a time when President Dwight David Eisenhower rejected rhetoric about a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union by asking, among other things, the practical question of how we would occupy the vast country if we won; of a time when the editor of Foreign Affairs invited a little-known diplomat named George Kennan to publish an article, an anonymous article, that established the bipartisan foundation of our Cold War foreign policy.
In every era we wrestle with how to reconcile the pragmatic with the moral elements of our strength and what we choose to do with both. We got it right, mostly, during the Cold War, when realists and idealists together built the institutions and policies serving our interests and our values. We got it drastically wrong when a small group of ideologues decided we didn't need those institutions or alliances or diplomacy or even the respect of other nations....

For the full transcript, please see the Council on Foreign Relations website.

Financial Architecture for Middle Class-Oriented Development

Articles — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400