Nuclear Issues

The Trump administration has never shown much interest in human rights. Last year, it pulled the United States out of the U.N. Human Rights Council. In 2017, within months of President Trump’s inauguration, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said diplomats should not let human rights values become “obstacles” to achieving national goals. Trump has spoken favorably about some of the world’s most vicious dictators.

It's been six months since President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said they came to an agreement on denuclearization, but new satellite images published this week by an independent Washington think tank showed at least 13 previously undeclared missile operating bases in North Korea.

Nicholas Burns, former State Department undersecretary, on the tensions between President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump's handling of U.S. foreign policy.

Sometime over the next several years, the next U.S. president could confront a genuinely dangerous threat from a faraway place — a North Korean missile that can hit U.S. territory with a nuclear warhead. David Ignatius, Senior Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project examines the threat from across the Pacific.

"...[K]eeping Iran at arm's length (or worse) reduces U.S. diplomatic leverage and flexibility. As long as U.S. Middle East policy remains fixated on its 'special relationships' with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and to some extent Egypt, these states will continue to take U.S. support for granted and ignore U.S. preferences more often than we'd like. But if the United States had decent working relations with every state in the region — including Iran — it could work constructively with any or all of them."

"Perhaps so much death and destruction take place around the Arab world, at the hands of Arabs, Israelis, Americans and others, because no serious process exists that holds individuals or governments accountable for the atrocities they commit. The International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir for war crimes a few years ago has never been followed up by a serious effort to bring him to court for a fair trial..."

"The Camp David summit last week among the United States and the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states ended with a fluffy communiqué whose mutual courtesies revealed no significant changes in either side’s positions. The troubling and ironic aspect of this event is that both sides were fixated on new security and military measures to address insecurities in the region — many of which exacerbated and some created by their own military policies and distorted threat perceptions. "

"The agreed parameters of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program that were reached Thursday between Iran and the P5+1 powers represent a monumental achievement that affirms the power of reason and diplomacy over the ravages of fear and warfare."

"When historians look back on the Middle East decades from now, they might find that trends in this region after 2015 were determined by the outcome of four seminal issues and battles that are in play this month."