Foreign Policy

On March 16, 2003, my daughter Rachel Corrie was crushed to death under a bulldozer driven by an Israel Defense Forces soldier. The bulldozer was manufactured in the United States by Caterpillar, Inc. and paid for by U.S. foreign military financing aid. My tax dollars paid for the machine used to kill my daughter.
 
In a telephone conversation the next day, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon promised President Bush a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation into Rachel’s killing with a report to the U.S. Government. In response, April 24, 2003, our family received a printed PowerPoint presentation circulating in Congress purporting to explain the death of our daughter. This report, created by officers in command of the IDF unit that killed Rachel, concluded, “Ms. Corrie was not run over by a bulldozer, but sustained injuries caused by earth and debris which fell on her during bulldozer operation.”

According to FOX News, Team Obama has decided to deploy 14 additional ground-based interceptors (GBI) in Alaska and California against the North Korean nuclear and missile threat, reversing itself on numbers proposed by the Bush administration.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Though it highlights the failure of the Obama administration’s policies toward North Korea in the first term in general, it’s a good idea for a couple of reasons.

New administrations often offer openings for new policies. One area where the US needs new initiatives is the South Caucasus because new opportunities and new challenges are emerging here and they each contain serious implications for critical U.S. interests. As the 2008 Russo-Georgian war showed, events in the South Caucasus have repercussions that go far beyond the region to encompass European security and that is still true today. Washington needs to grasp that this area’s intrinsic importance and local trends seriously affect major relationships in Europe and with Russia. The administration must not confine itself to seeing this region as merely an overflight or transit route for withdrawal of U.S. forces and equipment from Afghanistan but as an intrinsically critical region of considerable strategic significance whose security is also bound up with vital U.S. interests.

For more than a decade we observed a number of Irish Leaders from all political parties at the annual gathering at the White House to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. This year President Obama will continue to do what President Bush and President Clinton did by taking a picture with a bowl of shamrocks and telling the world that this is an example of what peace looks like. However, they omit that the peace progress from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has somewhat stalled.

Ten years ago this month, brutal attacks by the Government of Sudan against the people of Darfur first began to reach the world's attention. With over 300,000 dead and 4 million people displaced, it is past time for Congress and communities of conscience to address the root cause of atrocities in this long-suffering country – an unrepresentative regime that rules by repressing its own people.
 
As news of the horrors taking place in Darfur began to spread through Washington in 2003, members of Congress were quick to demand action, calling for U.S. sanctions to be placed on responsible Sudanese government officials.  Congress showed leadership by declaring the "atrocities unfolding in Darfur" to be genocide in a concurrent resolution in July 2004, two months before Secretary of State Powell publicly declared that a genocide had occurred. Despite global attention, some of the most organized advocacy efforts of our time, and swift action from Congress, the U.N., and other leaders in the international community, violence and insecurity continue to plague the region to this day.

As President Obama prepares for a Middle East trip that will take him to Israel, Jordan and the West Bank later this month, much of his attention is focused on neighboring Syria, where rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad are pressuring him to provide them with arms. Rebel supporters around the world are joining in the call.
 
The pressure is understandable. Assad is a brutal dictator waging war on his own people, with devastating consequences. According to the United Nations, fighting in Syria has claimed more than 70,000 lives and forced more than 4 million people from their homes – including 1 million who have fled the country.
 
But U.S. military aid to insurgent forces could have harmful and unintended consequences.



At the President’s Export Council meeting on Tuesday, President Barack Obama reiterated the importance of achieving a U.S.–EU free trade agreement. He said, “Europe is our largest trading partner – the EU as a whole – and we think that we can expand that even further.”



The need to expand the economic partnership was conveyed to Secretary of State John Kerry during his trip to Turkey two weeks ago. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership “is of crucial significance for Turkey,” and that he and Secretary Kerry spoke about the free trade agreement that was announced by President Obama in his State of the Union address in February. “We believe that Turkey needs to play a significant role in that structure,” Foreign Minister Davutoglu said. Secretary Kerry confirmed that they had reached an understanding on this issue: “The Foreign Minister and I talked about ways in which we can grow our significant economic partnership. He mentioned… the Transatlantic Investment Trade Partnership. This is a huge opportunity for all of Europe, for all of us... And I know the Foreign Minister looks forward to working with me, and we actually arrived at an understanding of a couple of ways in which we intend to continue to do that.”



Analysts conjectured years ago that a commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army named Caesar Acellam wanted to defect – and that he might be key to dismantling the group.
 
Last May, he came out of the bush. Within a few months, the U.S. military advisors who were deployed in late 2011 to help end the LRA conflict in Central and East Africa innovated a new technique for securing defections: using speakers mounted on helicopters to broadcast ‘come home’ messages. Acellam was one of the first people to fly over the Central African Republic to do a ‘live’ broadcast.

As the North Koreans carried out their threat today to scrap the 1953 Armistice agreement that effectively ended combat in the Korean War, words have been flying describing the North Korean regime as crazy and irrational.

But are they actually crazy and irrational? We don’t actually know.

What we do know is that the primary goal of the North Korean government is regime preservation — something that is completely rational and not crazy, despite the scary cult of personality that exists in that country. What we do not know is the thought process by which the Kim regime operates to achieve this strategic goal.

After continued historical American foreign policy follies one must ask, “What is it about the passage of time that causes apparent amnesia?" Not long ago, the institution of American foreign policy made the decision to aid, train, and implicitly arm rebels in Syria who are fighting against the Assad regime. Yes the Assad regime is committing atrocities. Yes the Assad regime is illegitimate. But American policy on Syria is so similar to policy choices of the past that have ended poorly for the institution of American foreign policy and those individuals we are trying to help. Sadder still is how often foreign policy decisions pay lip service to international law and human rights but are made on the basis of structural and geopolitical premises. The situation in Syria today like those it parallels is no different.