The economic news of recent days has unsettled the conventional wisdom that Washington will take an all-talk, no-action approach to fiscal policy until Election Day, with all sides posturing for electoral gain and delaying action to address looming deficits until late 2012 if not early 2013. Until recently, the political class assumed President Obama and …
Continue reading “Washington’s dangerous fiscal maneuvering”
The growing turmoil of the “Arab Spring”—the populist awakening that spread like a brushfire across the Middle East and North Africa after a desperate fruit peddler in Tunisia set himself afire in December of 2010—can shake the optimism of even the most enthusiastic human rights promoter. As of this writing, populist uprisings have toppled dictators …
Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program. To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other …
Continue reading “Global sanctions on Iran are working; relaxing them now would be foolhardy”
Nearly 40 years ago, a Congress disgusted with the value-less foreign policy realism of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford began to require the State Department to report each year on the human rights records of other countries. That requirement was part of a package of congressionally driven reforms of the mid-1970s that were designed …
Continue reading “Latest U.S. Report Is Timely Human Rights Reminder”
The upcoming Baghdad meeting over Iran’s nuclear program has raised legitimate hopes of a peaceful end to a high-stakes conflict, but it also raises risks that the P5+1 powers will misplay their hand – by either accepting a bad deal or letting Tehran buy time and make further progress on the nuclear front. Here, then, …
As U.S. and other global leaders prepare for their May 23rd meeting with Iranian officials on nuclear issues, the regime in Tehran continues to showcase its odious nature by abusing the rights of its people – particularly its gays. Gay rights in Iran may seem disconnected to Iran’s nuclear program but, in at least one …
“And so it goes.” The phrase, from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war classic, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a literary shrug; a way to dismiss death and destruction; a device for turning the page rather than confronting humanitarian horror. Collectively, that’s where we are in Syria. The region looks for U.S. leadership, but a war-weary, economically fragile America has …