TOKYO – When U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrives in Singapore this week to talk about containing China – and …
India
A New (and Improved) Trilateral Commission?
David Rockefeller launched the original Trilateral Commission nearly 40 years ago to bring together the world’s mercantile powers – the U.S., Europe and Japan – for the supposed betterment of all. Conspiracy theorists made …
Ten Years After 9/11, Is It Now Time to Be Scared of China?
As the commentaries, retrospectives and meditations pile up ten years after 9/11, expect quite a few in their closing paragraphs to look toward the next grand geo-political challenge facing the U.S. A decade of costly adventurism in the Middle East and Afghanistan, many will argue, distracted U.S. policy making from the new realities of …
Pakistanis, Indians, and the U.S. Taxpayer
Pakistan, you may have heard, is finding it challenging to battle the friendly (to them) Taliban forces on its soil that only cross into Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops (the Pakistanis have no compunction about killing the other Taliban — those trying to topple the government in Islamabad). So it was interesting to see the …
Militants Will Benefit if Pakistan is Blamed for Latest Mumbai Bombing
There’s no reason yet to believe the latest Mumbai terror attacks bear the same signature as the 2008 massacre that left 164 people dead. Wednesday’s multiple explosions appear from early reports to have involved small-scale and relatively crude bombs, even though they appear to have inflicted substantial casualties. That might point …
Why Obama’s Military Aid Cut is Unlikely to Change Pakistan’s Behavior
The Obama Administration clearly wants the American public to know it is not allowing Pakistan’s double game in Afghanistan and on militant jihadists to go unpunished: The New York Times reports that the U.S. is withholding some $800 million — one third of the aid designated for the Pakistani military — to send a message that …
A.Q. Khan’s Revelations: Did Pakistan’s Army Sell Nukes to North Korea?
Abdul Qadeer Khan is tired of being a scapegoat. The controversial father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb shared hi-tech secrets and equipment with a host of rogue regimes — including North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya — earning himself international notoriety and a 2005 TIME magazine cover that dubbed him “the Merchant of Menace.” …
Defense Roundtable: “Show Me the Missions”
The New America Foundation’s sponsored debate over defense spending showcased two schools of American political thought entirely comfortable with allowing American power and influence to decline on the global stage.
Future grand strategists speak: Why US withdrawal from Afghanistan would stabilize Pakistan
In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat‘s month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow’s best and brightest thinkers. And …
The CIA-After-Next: Who’s Gonna Run This World
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on …
US bases in Afghanistan for decades?
Waiting on the Obama speech explaining this one.
Guardian piece Monday predicts that current US-Afghan talks will cement a very long-term deal on presence [hat tip to World Politics Review Media Roundup].
American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which
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The politics of nukes and why the U.S. can’t dump Pakistan
In June 2009, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the former leader of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, was asked what might happen to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if that country’s government destabilized into chaos. This might set off a mad scramble for parts of Pakistan’s significant nuclear arsenal, possibly even causing the United States to execute …
Collateral Damage on that Indian Fighter Non-Deal
Colleague Jyoti Thottam reports from New Delhi on Time‘s Global Spin blog that U.S. ambassador to India Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, has quit following India’s scratching of both U.S. warplanes from its shopping list:
We are…deeply disappointed by this news. We look forward to continuing to grow and
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