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Foreign Policy Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 05, 2014 48 Comments
In her sparsely attended speech at Georgetown University this week, Hillary Clinton gave attendees a glimpse of her views on foreign policy and national defense by saying America should empathize with its enemies. This leads to a natural question: How does one "empathize" with ISIS terrorists who are currently beheading and crucifying their way across the Middle East? Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:
It’s difficult to know where to start with this nonsense from a recent speech given by Hillary Clinton, in which the presumed Democratic front-runner finally defines what she sees as “smart power,” and what she claims is a 21st-century approach to diplomacy. In large part, the former Secretary of State says it means psychoanalyzing enemies to understand them better, which … is exactly what nations have been doing for centuries, if not millenia.
Watch the video: This world view reminds me of another Democrat who's not running in 2016:

Posted by Amy Miller on October 28, 2014 13 Comments
After Russia's March annexation of Crimea, reports surfaced of serious human rights abuses against both Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians who refused Russian citizenship. Now, threats of military action from pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine have eastern Europe on alert, and have motivated Poland to make changes to its military structure that haven't been seen since the Cold War. From the Associated Press:
[Polish Defense Minister] Tomasz Siemoniak said the troops are needed in the east because of the conflict in neighboring Ukraine. "The geopolitical situation has changed, we have the biggest crisis of security since the Cold War and we must draw conclusions from that," Siemoniak said. He said that at least three military bases in the east will see their populations increase from the current 30 percent of capacity to almost 90 percent by 2017, and that more military hardware will be moved to those bases as well. He said it was not some "nervous or radical move" but that because of this "situation of threat we would like those units in the east of Poland to be more efficient."
According to the AP report, current military establishments along the eastern border of Poland are only 30% staffed as part of a long term plan to move troops to those installations only in the event of serious conflict. This troop movement, then, is not insignificant.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 21, 2014 3 Comments
A memo recently circulated amongst lawyers working for the Obama Administration and in the intelligence community has sparked debate about the future of the United Nations Convention Against Torture as it applies to enhanced interrogation techniques used by Americans overseas. The Administration has a month to decide its stance on the treaty in advance of a scheduled presentation before the UN Committee Against Torture. It will have to choose between the opinion of the State Department, that of the intelligence community, or something in between: From the New York Times:
State Department lawyers are said to be pushing to officially abandon the Bush-era interpretation. Doing so would require no policy changes, since Mr. Obama issued an executive order in 2009 that forbade cruel interrogations anywhere and made it harder for a future administration to return to torture. But military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad. They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts. They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture, although courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits brought by detainees held as terrorism suspects.
You may remember that the Bush Administration used a constitutionally-based interpretation of the Treaty that allowed for the use of tactics covered by the treaty if they were used on non-citizens outside of the United States. The Administration took heat for the interpretation, and then-Senator Barack Obama spoke out in favor of adhering to the transnational spirit of the treaty and banning cruel treatment no matter where it may take place.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 10, 2014 17 Comments
If Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, will she pull an Obama, and blame everything on her predecessor, the way Obama still blames Bush for everything? Even if it's a President from her own party?  And an administration she participated in? And a Foreign Policy she helped develop? From recent interviews, looks like Hillary has found her George Bush, and it's Obama. A new report from FOX News seems to indicate that when it comes to foreign policy, she she'll be running against Obama's legacy:
Clinton critical of Obama foreign policy, says 'failure' to act in Syria created vacuum for jihad Hillary Clinton, the front-runner among potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, is sharply distancing herself from President Obama's foreign policy, particularly in Syria, as Americans appear to continue losing confidence in his handling of key international affairs. Clinton, who as secretary of state was Obama’s top diplomat, suggested during an in-depth interview with The Atlantic magazine that the president’s foreign-policy mantra of “don’t do stupid stuff” lacked sufficient depth. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said in the roughly 8,000-word interview released Sunday. “And ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” The interview comes as Americans’ opinion of how Obama is handling crises in Israel, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, continues to sink. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released Tuesday, three days before Obama ordered airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops in Syria, showed a record-high disapproval rating. Sixty percent of those polled disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy efforts, compared to 36 percent who approved. The interview also could help or hurt the former first lady’s effort to burnish her own foreign policy credentials ahead of an official 2016 campaign.
The significance of Hillary's position wasn't lost on Maggie Haberman of Politico:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 24, 2009 20 Comments

I can't keep up with all the ways in which this administration is failing. From the health care restructuring proposals gone sour, to the slippage in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the appeasement of Hugo Chavez and Iran and the bullying of Honduras, to the end...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 12, 2009 8 Comments

Mary Robinson will get the United States Medal of Freedom today.Ms. Robinson presided over the 2001 “"World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance," in Durban, South Africa. Durban was an anti-Semitic hate fest, a grotesque and macabre exercise in linguistic word games...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 14, 2009 16 Comments

Nancy Pelosi is holding a press conference in which she has acknowledged being briefed by the CIA about waterboarding in 2002, but accuses the CIA of lying to Congress about the use of the technique and whether the techniques were legal. Pelosi also acknowledged, when...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 18, 2009 0 Comments

I happened upon the following, which I hope you will enjoy as much as I did:Mr. Reagan tells the story of the time in 1981 when a senior admiral came to the White House to brief the President and Cabinet on maneuvers scheduled to begin...

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