Monday’s reported explosion at Iran’s secretive Parchin nuclear site – leaving two dead and shattering windows 12 kilometers away – is welcome news to those concerned about Tehran’s nuclear progress, but it’s likely a mere blip on what seems an increasingly smooth Iranian road to nuclear weaponry. For a host of reasons, Washington is growing …
The future path of U.S.-led nuclear negotiations with Iran, which have now reached a crucial stage, may be foreshadowed in the U.S. agreement with Syria to dismantle its chemical weapons program. Any U.S.-Iranian deal-making that follows the Syrian model, however, would prove nothing more than a pyrrhic victory, leaving the Middle East more dangerous and, …
WASHINGTON — “My job as commander in chief,” an exasperated President Obama told critics this week, “is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely. And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American …
Continue reading “No, Mr. President, your critics aren’t just neoconservatives”
The secret text of recent days that reportedly describes how Iran will implement its six-month nuclear deal raises justifiable fears that, in fleshing out the details, Washington opened the door to more Iranian progress. That neither the United States nor the European Union will release the paper seems ominous, for they’d do so if they …
Continue reading “Critics justifiably fear latest Western deal-making with Iran”
WASHINGTON — America’s top foreign policy to-do’s in 2014 include preventing Iran from reaching the nuclear threshold, addressing the humanitarian disaster in Syria, containing an expansionist Russia, managing a rising China and reclaiming its own voice on human rights. Let’s take these one at a time. Preventing a nuclear Iran: The global agreement over Iran’s …
Continue reading “Unwavering democratic doctrines will let US shape events again”
A congressional push for more sanctions against Iran raises a difficult question related to the six-month global deal over Tehran’s nuclear program and to President Barack Obama’s stature as America’s commander-in-chief and top diplomat. The question: Should Congress, at moments when it disagrees with a President’s foreign policy, try to re-write that policy even if, …
Continue reading “President-Congress Clash Over Iran Sanctions Won’t Serve U.S. Interests”
In the messy aftermaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, critics of U.S. interventionism abroad have exerted great influence over the direction of U.S. foreign policy, putting interventionists on the defensive. The anti-interventionist ascendancy has clearly influenced U.S. policymaking toward Iran (where President Obama seems determined, at all costs, to avoid military action in response to Tehran’s …
Continue reading “Non-intervention facilitated a victory for tyrants and terrorists in Syria”