Twenty-five years ago this month President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a summit that appears, in retrospect, to truly be the “turning point in the Cold War.”
The Obama administration has publicly accused Iran of plotting to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington. Why?
Sir Daniel Bethlehem considers whether policy makers are asking themselves the right questions regarding out-of-theater targeting.
On September 30, a United States drone strike in northern Yemen killed Anwar al-Aulaqi, an influential and American-born member of al-Qaeda. Al-Aulaqi is believed to have inspired several successful and attempted terrorist attacks, including the Fort Hood shooting in 2009 and the Times Square bomb attempt in 2010. There is a great deal of debate about the legal and policy implications of the strike. Some have argued that killing al-Aulaqi significantly increased American security, while others argue that it will have little long-term effect because it does nothing to address the growing radicalization in Yemen. Similarly, while some argue that
The happy outcome of Kaddafi’s removal does not make the Libyan project a sensible enterprise for the United States and its allies to have undertaken―let alone a model for future interventions.
By Malik Ahmad Jalal* Click here to read the full text as a PDF The Roman Empire in Germania, the French in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan all conjure up the myth that insurgencies cannot be defeated. In recent years, this notion has only been reinforced by NATO’s slow progress against the Taliban. Yet counterinsurgency strategies can, in fact, succeed. One of the most instructive examples is that of the Sri Lankan Army’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers, one of the most violent and persistent insurgent groups of the twentieth century. The Sri
