Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Obama Foreign Policy Tag

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on May 19, 2016 5 Comments
China will play a greater geostrategic role in the Middle East and Africa thanks to the construction of the new transnational corridor. The 2,500 km-long network of highways, railways, pipelines and ports will connect the Western Chinese city of Kashgar with Pakistan's deep-sea port of Gwadar. China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), as the project is officially called, comes at an initial cost of $46 billion within the next 10-15 years. The corridor reduces China’s dependence on its main Malacca route. Presently 85 percent of the China's oil imports pass through the single chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca, located between Indonesia and Malaysia. With Pakistan's ports Gwadar and Karachi under control, Beijing would have direct access to resources and markets in Middle East and Africa. China already operates several ports in Africa, including its first overseas naval and military base near Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 02, 2016 5 Comments
Gen. Philip Breedlove, the top military commander of NATO, has warned the organization they need to focus on Russia before he leaves his position at the end of May. “We see that Russia has not accepted the hand of partnership but has chosen a path of belligerence,” he stated. “We need to readdress where we’re heading.” Breedlove leaves his position "this month after three years in the top military job at NATO." His statements come after NATO announced they will send 4,000 troops to the Baltic States - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - and Poland. “The Russians have been doing a lot of snap exercises right up against the borders, with a lot of troops,” Robert Work, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, told The Wall Street Journal. “From our perspective, we could argue this is extraordinarily provocative behavior.”

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 20, 2016 12 Comments
In December 2012, Professor Jacobson posted "Barack Morsi". It turns out the title was truer than he realized. President Obama took the advice of "back-benchers" over experienced security experts to promote the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, creating condition for the usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi:
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Fox News that President Barack Obama ignored the advice of his “entire national security team” during the Egyptian coup in 2011 that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the country’s former president.

Posted by Miriam Elman on March 17, 2016 7 Comments
At a 9:00am press conference this morning, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the Islamic State’s actions perpetrated against ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians, are “genocidal” and constitute crimes against humanity. In the brief (10 minute) statement, Kerry refers throughout to the Islamic State (ISIS) as Daesh, its Arabic acronym. https://twitter.com/Malinowski/status/710456022247280640

Posted by David Gerstman on March 09, 2016 11 Comments
Ahead of Vice President Joe Biden's trip to Israel, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the White House is considering new efforts to revive the Middle East peace process.
The internal discussions are aimed at offering a blueprint for future Israeli-Palestinian talks in a bid to advance a critical foreign-policy initiative that has made little progress during Mr. Obama's two terms in the White House, the officials said. The strongest element on the list of options under consideration would be U.S. support for a Security Council resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past. Other initiatives could include a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet, an international group comprising the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
According to the Journal, the President Barack Obama hasn't made up his mind but "is considering a range of options." In any case no decision is expected until later this year.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 22, 2016 7 Comments
If you receive Morning Insurrection, you would have seen Prof. Miriam Elman's recommendation to read Jonah Goldberg's piece on the importance of foreign policy in the upcoming election. (If you don't currently read Morning Insurrection see the signup box in the upper right-hand corner of Legal Insurrection.) Goldberg wrote:
We can debate how much blame Obama deserves for Syria’s civil war, but almost no one outside his paid staff disputes that he’s only made things worse. The conflict there has set off the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since the end of World War II — that’s John Kerry’s own assessment — which may yet tear the European Union asunder. The instability closer to the fighting is even more dangerous. Russia and Turkey may soon go to war with one another, as Russia mercilessly and indiscriminately massacres anyone standing in the way of its pet, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The Jordanian monarchy may crumble, in part for a lack of assistance from the United States.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on February 18, 2016 7 Comments
With each passing day, it gets more and more difficult to ignore the monumental disaster that Obama’s foreign policy actually is. Nowhere is its utter failure more glaringly evident than in the Syrian Civil War. But first, let us not underestimate the pathologies of the Middle East that have led to the present disaster in Syria, but Obama administration’s policies have created perils that we would be dealing with, in decades to come. The geopolitical vacuum created by President Obama’s push to shrink America’s footprint in the Middle East has quickly been filled by Comrade Putin’s soviet-style jackboots. And President Obama-backed Nuclear Deal has single-handedly contributed billions of dollars to Islamic Republic of Iran’s war chest geared at funding global terrorism and regional adventures.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 16, 2016 6 Comments
We hear from critics of Israel that Israel needs a two-state solution to be  legitimate. Without a Palestinian state, the argument goes, Israel will rule over millions of resentful Palestinians to whom it will have to deny their basic rights in order to maintain its Jewish nature. Or if Israel enfranchises the Palestinians, they could overwhelm the Jews with their votes and then Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. So the reasoning goes, without a separate Palestinian state, Israel will either cease being Jewish or democratic. But there was already a separation achieved in 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accords. By the end of 1995 Israel had withdrawn from the major population areas in the West Bank, leaving over 90% of Palestinians under the political control of the Palestinian Authority. In 2005, Israel "disengaged" from Gaza ending the occupation of that territory.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 12, 2016 2 Comments
There has been quite a bit of BDS-related legislative activity in the several weeks, with two anti-BDS measures moving through Congress, and activity in several state legislatures.  While the legislatures universally oppose BDS, President Obama has weighed in in opposition to Congress's pro-Israel legislation.

Federal Anti-BDS Legislation

First, Wednesday afternoon Senators Mark Kirk (R. - IL) and Joe Manchin (D. - WV) and Representatives Bob Dold (R. - IL) and Juan Vargas (D. - CA) filed a bill to help states divest from BDS-supporting companies.  According to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon:
The new bill, which was filed Wednesday afternoon, marks an aggressive push by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to combat the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, otherwise known as BDS, which advocates in favor of economic war against the Jewish state. The bill would provide legal shelter to states seeking to divest taxpayer funds from any company that has backed the BDS movement. It also would set a legal precedent granting safe harbor for private investment companies to do the same.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 10, 2016 2 Comments
While President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have assured us that the nuclear deal with Iran has delayed war, Tony Badran in a devastating critique of the administration's foreign policy last week wrote, "Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now." Back in 2014, Badran noted, President Obama said of the turmoil in the Middle East, "A lot of it has to do with changes that are taking place in the Middle East in which an old order that had been in place for 50 years, 60 years, 100 years was unsustainable, and was going to break up at some point. And now, what we are seeing is the old order not working, but the new order not being born yet -- and it is a rocky road through that process, and a dangerous time through that process." But a few months earlier, Obama, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, made very clear that his intent was to make Iran an agent of changing the orders. When Goldberg asked him why the Sunni states seem to fear him so much Obama answered, "I think that there are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran, even if most of that was rhetorical and didn't actually translate into stopping the nuclear program. But the rhetoric was good. What I've been saying to our partners in the region is, 'We've got to respond and adapt to change.'"

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 10, 2016 6 Comments
The U.S. move to boost NATO forces in Eastern Europe is another black mark on President Obama and Hillary Clinton's foreign policy.  The decision to strengthen NATO's bulwark against further Russian adventurism is sound in itself, but it further exposes the 2009 Russia Reset as a naive, amateurish blunder.  The cost for the mistake - a mistake many recognized and warned against at the time - is still being reckoned on battlefields in Eastern Ukraine. President Obama entered office determined to distance himself from U.S. foreign policy that made no sense to his ideological view.  Among the anachronisms he identified was the tense U.S.-Russia relationship.  Relations with Russia degraded through President Bush's second term, and than cratered when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and President Bush responded by deploying U.S. warships to the Black Sea and airlifting Georgian troops home from Afghanistan. Two months after taking office, Obama dispatched his newly-appointed Secretary of State - Hillary Clinton - to reset relations with Russia.  In March, 2009, Clinton met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva, Switzerland, and gave him a big, red, plastic button with the Russian word "peregruzka" on it.  Clinton thought it meant "reset;" it actually meant "overcharge."

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 07, 2016 5 Comments
The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") added five more Russians to the Specially Designated Nationals List pursuant to the Magnitsky Act on February 1. In a press statement, a senior State Department official noted that one of the officials had nothing to do with the murder of the eponymous Sergei Magnitsky, but rather was involved in Russia's brutal war in Chechnya.

Sergei Magnitsky and the Magnitsky Act

The Magnitsky Act is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney arrested on trumped-up charges arising in retaliation for his exposing official Russian corruption in the course of representing of American investor Bill Browder.  Magnitsky died after being beaten by Russian police while in police custody and denied medical treatment despite his injuries and preexisting illness.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 04, 2016 11 Comments
The disastrous JCPOA and President Obama's political compulsion to hide Iranian wrong-doing have infected the entire Democratic Party.  Instead of responding to Iran's support for terrorism and violations of its international commitments by imposing penalties, President Obama - and now his Democratic allies in Congress - are running cover. David Gerstmen wrote last month that "Obama’s Passivity in Face of Aggression Puts Iran in Driver’s Seat" and
in October, Iran tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile that was later determined by the United Nations to have been in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929.  The administration, in response to Congressional pressure, was set to impose new sanctions on Iran at the end of 2015, but retreated when threatened by Iran.
Rather than leave Obama exposed to more embarrassment if he has to veto or block an Iran sanctions bill, Senate Democrats are trying to do the work for him.  According to The Hill:

Posted by David Gerstman on February 03, 2016 7 Comments
Three weeks ago, ten American sailors on two naval boats were seized by Iran. One of the first readouts of what happened came from the State Department with this tidbit:
Now, the Secretary then got on the phone with Foreign Minister Zarif for the first time – I think the first of at least five phone calls they had during the course of that afternoon and evening – at about 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The main message that he – there were a few messages he wanted to convey to the foreign minister. One, to provide him with some information about our understanding of what had happened, which was not perfect but was sort of developing in real time. And we had gathered some information including that the sailors were in transit at the time of the incident, that they were in transit between Kuwait and Bahrain, that they may have had some sort of mechanical problem – although at that point we weren’t sure – that we had lost communications with them, and that we had indications that they were now located on Farsi Island in the Gulf. The Secretary made clear that our most important priority – and that this was critical – was that they be released, obviously, safely and unharmed and as quickly as possible, and that if we were able to do this – and this is something that he said to Zarif on a few occasions – if we are able to do this in the right way, we can make this into what will be a good story for both of us.
Think about that last line, "a good story for both of us."

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 02, 2016 4 Comments
As negotiations to negotiate an end to the Syrian civil war plod along, the UN has admitted, internally, that it is powerless to enforce any Syria peace deal. According to Foreign Policy, the UN knows it cannot enforce or even monitor any peace deal it brokers:
In a confidential strategy paper exclusively obtained by Foreign Policy, the office of the United Nations’ top envoy to Syria warns that the U.N. would be unable to monitor or enforce any peace deal that might emerge from landmark political talks underway in Geneva. The paper raised concerns the world might harbor unrealistic expectations about the U.N.’s ability to oversee and verify a cease-fire in a civil war beset by a dizzying array of armed factions and terrorist groups. “The current international and national political context and the current operational environment strongly suggest that a U.N. peacekeeping response relying on international troops or military observers would be an unsuitable modality for ceasefire monitoring,” according to the “Draft Ceasefire Modalities Concept Paper” by U.N. envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura’s team. In plain English, that means Syria will be far too dangerous for some time for traditional U.N. peacekeepers to handle.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 14, 2016 14 Comments
With the news that Iran has seized two American boats and detained 10 American sailors in the Persian Gulf just ahead of the State of the Union earlier this week, I'd like to go back to something that President Barack Obama said a little more than a year ago. Even though the sailors have been released, albeit under humiliating circumstances, the real story here, which the media is generally ignoring, is that they were taken prisoner in the first place. At the end of 2014, Obama gave an interview to Steve Inskeep of NPR. When explaining his rationale for the nuclear deal this is what Obama said:
So, when I came into office, the world was divided and Iran was in the driver's seat. Now the world's united because of the actions we've taken, and Iran's the one that's isolated.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 13, 2016 54 Comments
Every confrontation with Iran has a phase which is much more important to the Iranians than the physical outcome. It's the humiliation phase, in which the Iranians get to exploit photos and video showing their opponents as weak and the Iranians as strong. We saw it throughout the U.S. Embassy hostage drama in 1979-1980, in which the hostages were paraded in front of the cameras and crowds. Iran Hostage Crisis The 10 U.S. sailors were released earlier today after Iran seized two small U.S. Navy boats yesterday. Iran demanded an apology and is claiming it got one, though the U.S. denies that. There is no doubt, however, that the pathetic and delusional John Kerry openly thanked the Iranians:
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday thanked Iran for its cooperation in the release of 10 sailors who had mistakenly entered Iran's territorial waters, an incident that stoked international tension.
Accessibility by WAH