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Foreign Policy Challenges Obama or Romney Will Face After Election
Tweet Share on Facebook October 24, 2012 CommentRobert Zarate is policy director at the Foreign Policy Initiative.
As President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney debated Monday for the third and final time, national security took center stage. It's a good thing, too. While the economy and jobs have understandably dominated the presidential race, whoever occupies the White House in January 2013 will be not only the president of the United States, but also the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces—and the leader of the free world. He'll have to be ready to deal with a host of challenges to foreign and defense policy that, in many instances, are only getting more complicated and high-stakes with each passing day. It's worth taking a moment to step back and reflect on what two of those immediate challenges will be.
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Navy Size Deserves Conversation Beyond 'Horses and Bayonets'
Tweet Share on Facebook October 24, 2012 CommentMichael P. Noonan is the director of the program on national security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
During the presidential debate on Monday night undoubtedly the most talked about segment (although not for the right reasons) came from the following exchange:
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Military Rule in Pakistan Must Be Scaled Back
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2012 CommentJeff M. Smith is the Kraemer strategy fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
The outrage seen on Pakistan's streets over the recent shooting of 14 year-old Malala Yousefzai is a welcome contrast to the silence that greets so many acts of violence there. The liberal lawmaker Salman Taseer, assassinated by his bodyguard in 2010 for daring to speak out against Pakistan's arcane blasphemy laws, received no such outpouring of sympathy. There was no public outcry earlier this year when a Pakistani cabinet minister personally offered a $100,000 reward to any man who killed the filmmaker behind an incendiary anti-Islam video.
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Turkey Disappointed With Obama’s Syria Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2012 CommentDr. Benitez is director of NATOSource and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
When Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with President Barack Obama in March, he described him as "my dear friend Barack," and stated that he was "very pleased to see that our views in general very much overlap on" Syria. A lot has changed since March, and Turkey's leaders are now far from pleased with Obama's perceived inaction on the escalating crisis in Syria.
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What the European Union Must Do Post-Nobel Prize
Tweet Share on Facebook October 22, 2012 CommentScheherazade S. Rehman is a professor of international finance/business and international affairs at The George Washington University. You can visit her homepage here and follow her on Twitter @Prof_Rehman.
Last week we began the discussion on the possibility of "a new world order" in which potential new superpowers would rise—the prime candidates being the European Union, Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, and China, in no particular order. We will take each of them in turn. These heirs apparent together with the United States account for more than 50 percent of the world population and approximate 66 percent of the global gross domestic product in nominal terms.
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How the World Must Respond to Shooting of 14-Year-Old Pakistani Girl
Tweet Share on Facebook October 22, 2012 CommentDaniel Gallington is the senior policy and program adviser at the George C. Marshall Institute in Arlington, Va. He served in senior national security policy positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Justice, and as general counsel for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
What kind of ignorant thugs would try to kill a 14 year-old girl because she was advocating school for girls—and do it in the name of religion, any religion? What kind of religion could possibly condone these despicable and cowardly acts? And, why is any violence against women and girls allowed to go on anywhere in the world? Isn't it—at the very least—against "international law"?
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Don't Assume Women Don't Care About National Security
Tweet Share on Facebook October 22, 2012 CommentHeather Hurlburt is the executive director of the National Security Network in Washington, D.C. Heather previously served in the Clinton administration as speechwriter to the president, and as speechwriter and policy planning staff for Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher. Follow her on Twitter at @NatSecHeather.
What a difference a week makes. Last week, national news outlets were falling over each other to declare women the decisive factor in this nail-biter of a presidential campaign. Former Gov. Mitt Romney gave us the newly-immortal "binders full of women" line to describe his concern for women's issues; it has already spawned follow-up ads from both campaigns as well as enough Internet humor to knock a half-percentage point off our national economic productivity.
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Neither Obama nor Romney Can Afford To Ignore Africa
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentStephen Hayes is president and CEO of the Corporate Council on Africa.
The next president of the United States, whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, will likely be faced with a financial challenge unlike any faced by his predecessors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt. He will stand at the precipice of the fiscal cliff and perhaps shudder as he looks at the abyss below, darkened in its depths. Soon thereafter the American people as well as those around the globe will begin to know what he really plans economically to help fill this particular pit of the economic Inferno.
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The Threat of Libyan Weapons of Mass Destruction
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentAndrew S. Natsios is an executive professor at the George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and the author of Sudan, South Sudan and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know. Natsios served as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and as President George W. Bush's Special Envoy to Sudan.
On October 9 Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur, a former engineering professor at the University of Alabama, was removed that country's parliament, plunging the fragile political system into yet another crisis. It had not recovered from the political storm following the death in a terrorist attack of four American officials in the American Consulate in Benghazi, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. The immediate cause of Abushagur's removal arose out of a tribal and ideological conflict over appointments in the new cabinet, but the crisis obscured a larger challenge facing the post-Qadhafi government: locating and disposing of the weapons of mass destruction, and man-portable surface-to-air missiles, or MANPADS, left over from Qadhafi's reign. While some U.S. government sources have tended to downplay the presence of these weapons, the evidence suggests otherwise.
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The Differences Between Obama and Romney on Foreign Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentMackenzie Eaglen is a resident fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
On Monday, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will turn to foreign policy. Despite the fact that America's military is now in its 12th year fighting in Afghanistan, foreign and defense policy issues have played a small role in the election. When the candidates have touched on foreign policy, the exchanges have been limited for the most part to Libya, Iran, and Romney's defense budget plans.
