Middle East & North Africa

Stephen Walt writes that the differences in foreign policy will be less significant than one may think. Consider how Trump and Biden would each likely deal with the three most important items on the current foreign-policy agenda: Ukraine, China, and the Middle East.

In the Henty Mance interview, Joseph Nye, who coined term 'soft power,' says that the turmoil facing the United States and Harvard was worse in the 1960s.

Stephen Walt argues for greater foreign-policy restraint by the United States: U.S. foreign policy would be more successful if it did less but did the vital things well.

 Stephen Walt decided to look back to see if 2022 had gone according to his expectations. In his last column of 2021, he had described "Biden’s 2022 Foreign-Policy To-Do List." What did he get right, what did he get wrong, and how well did the Biden administration perform?

Stephen Walt analyzes why self-imposed restraint will always be a contradiction in terms for Washington. Ideology, power, bureaucratic momentum, and other states' desires to use U.S. power for their own ends combine to create a powerful predisposition to do something and a concomitant inability to set clear priorities and stick to them when temptation arises.

Ivan Arreguin-Toft argues that non-material considerations like cyber power matter just as much as material ones in debates about U.S. retrenchment from the Middle East.

Stephen Walt critiques Biden's foreign policy record and argues for creative solutions to the problems of a new era.

Kelly Greenhill argues that by exploiting political divisions that exist within targeted states, the threatened or actual deployment of engineered flows of migrants has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail, its use.

The Russian/Chinese-led bloc is expected to approve Iran's accession this week amid uncertainty over President Raisi's foreign posture and ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan.

Nathaniel L. Moir writes of historical cases in which a U.S. tendency to over-rely on military capabilities and American economic strength proved unwise and how such power eventually proved to be irrelevant. In addition to the Vietnam War as an example, the rapid collapse of the Republic of China and its large military forces in late 1948 and 1949 offers some parallels with the collapse of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan Government, despite the United States investment of trillions of U.S. dollars.