16 Items

A model of the Capitol Building is displayed on a giant planning map during a media tour highlighting inaugural preparations Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016, at the DC Armory in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

A Conservative’s Prescriptive Policy Checklist: U.S. Foreign Policies in the Next Four Years to Shape a New World Order

| Jan. 09, 2017

Based on the rigorous definition of vital U.S. national interests, this essay proposes a prescriptive checklist of U.S. policy steps that would strengthen the domestic base of American external actions; reinforce the U.S. alliance systems in Asia and Europe; meet the Chinese and Russian challenges, while improving the quality of diplomatic exchanges with Beijing and Moscow; reshape U.S. trade policy; gradually pivot from the Middle East to Asia (but not from Europe); maintain the nuclear agreement with Iran; and confront international terrorism more aggressively, but with minimal U.S. boots on the ground in ungoverned areas and without nation building.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Russia, and European Security

Testimony

North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Russia, and European Security

| July 7, 2016

On the eve of the Warsaw NATO Summit, Professor Burns and his Co-Chair of a recent Atlantic Council report on NATO, General Jim Jones, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. They described the current situation in Europe—including Putin's widespread aggression, a weakening European Union, the tsunami of instability from the Middle East and uncertain western leadership—as the greatest threat to peace since the end of the Cold War. 



They advocated strong measures in response including the permanent stationing of NATO forces in Poland, the Baltic States, the Black Sea and the Arctic.  We also advocated that the U.S. and EU maintain sanctions on Russia for its illegal division of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

A Yazidi refugee family from Sinjar, Iraq arrives on the Greek island of Lesvos after travelling on a vessel from the Turkish coast. Dec 3, 2015.

AP Images/M. Muheisen

Policy Brief

"2015: The Year We Mistook Refugees for Invaders"

| January 4, 2016

"As 2015 comes to a close, the annual numbers of migrants smuggled to Greece and Italy and asylum claims lodged in Germany have passed a million, as well as the number of additional displacements produced this year by the conflict in Syria. Moreover, Europe’s Mediterranean shore has now the unchallenged title of the world’s most lethal border. Not only this. The migrant crisis is also putting to the test some of Europe’s most fundamental values, from the freedom of circulation within its territories, to international protection beyond..."

Foreign illegal laborers wait in a long queue outside the Saudi immigration offices at the Al-Isha quarter of the Al-Khazan district, west of Riyadh.

Getty Images (FAYEZ NURELDINE)

Policy Brief

Addressing Irregular Migration in the Gulf States

| November 2015

"Irregular migration has great resonance in the Gulf, just as in the West. Migrants in irregular situation avoid state administrative procedures and so their numbers are unknown. The largest amnesty (Saudi Arabia 2013) would have affected more than 50 per cent of the migrants in the country. Irregular migration is by definition a breach of legislations that regulate the migrant’s status.

In the Gulf States it is, in particular, a by-product of: the sponsorship (kafâla) system that hampers both a migrant’s individual freedom of movement and the free functioning of the labour market; nationalisation policies that continue to extend the list of occupations reserved for nationals; and nationality laws that bar citizenship to all but a very few first- and second-generation migrants."