The National Interest Online

Whichever U.S. party forms the next administration will have to do so in circumstances where America’s capacity for decisive action in the outside world has been greatly diminished, at least compared to the grandiose ambitions which the Bush administration nourished in its first three years in power. Most importantly, Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed the immense expenditure of troops and money required to fight even medium-size mass insurgencies--to the extent that America’s ability to engage in any additional ground wars is in serious question.

In part, this is… more

Opening the papers in Pakistan this morning, two French maxims came to mind. The first is that “every man has to digest a toad every day before breakfast.” This thought was inspired by the front page news that the next President of Pakistan will most probably be Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, and widely known among both Pakistanis and Westerners here as “Mr. Ten Percent.” Corruption charges against him were dropped--contrary to Pakistan’s law and constitution--on the orders of now ex-President Musharraf as… more

In the wake of Russia’s military incursion into Georgia, too many current, former, and aspiring U.S. officials are caricaturing the Russian state that was shaped and is still guided by Vladimir Putin as a revisionist aggressor. For Robert Kagan, John McCain’s neoconservative foreign policy adviser, as well as for long-time Democratic foreign policy hands Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus, Russia’s actions in Georgia are comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. For Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Russia’s actions are more reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in… more

There is an opportunity to hammer out a grand compromise with Iran—one that would even address its nuclear program. But the Bush administration seems determined to prevent talks that could advance vital U.S. interests.

Much of the media coverage of last Saturday’s nuclear talks between representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the so-called P-5+1, including the United States), and the secretary general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, reflected a disturbing historical amnesia about previous U.S.-Iranian negotiations. Indeed, listening… more

...From July 7–9, as the Nixon Center’s executive director and moderator of the discussion Paul Saunders said, the world’s heaviest hitters will meet to discuss the most-pressing problems. Former ambassador to Germany and current managing director at McLarty Associates, Richard Burt, and Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation met at the Nixon Center on Wednesday to look at an even-more-basic issue: whether the G8 still matters. Or, as Ambassador Burt asked, if it ever did.

The G8’s purview is simply too broad to be effective, Burt argued. The… more

As the presidency of General Pervez Musharraf enters what seem to be its last days, we need to keep one thing firmly in mind. It is that despite the Bush administration’s support for Musharraf, it was also the Bush administration that did the most to destroy him, by forcing him into a subordinate role in a war on terror that most Pakistanis detest. It was not Musharraf’s (very mild) “dictatorship,” but the tag of “Busharraf” which originally crippled his domestic… more

Over the first half of 2007, central banks in the world’s emerging economies accumulated over $600 billion of new reserves. That’s double the total reserve position of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- an institution whose mission used to include preventing the collapse of these same governments, and whose new managing director recently raised questions about the body’s “relevance and legitimacy.” Over the same period, China, Russia and Japan joined the list of governments establishing “sovereign wealth funds”, whose worldwide… more

In his lackluster State of the Union address last night, President Bush defined America’s military actions in the Middle East as the “defining challenge of our time” and yet overall, Bush offered no credible plan that could lead to an improvement in America’s circumstances.

Yet again, Bush hyped the fear that Americans should feel from terrorists, who, he said, “want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty.” He stated that “this war is… more