South Asia

As President Donald Trump heads to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he'll have the support of many other world leaders, former ambassador Nicholas Burns told CNBC on Thursday.

In the global revulsion at the recent terror attacks in four Muslim countries, the United States and its allies have a new opportunity to build a unified command against the Islamic State and other extremists. FDP Senior Fellow David Ignatius examines the diplomatic relationships needed to create an effective counterterrorism strategy.

"The large number of signatories on the dissenting memo is truly historic, but what's equally significant is that these diplomats have now joined a long line of government dissidents during cases of mass atrocity. These 51 names, as yet unknown, undoubtedly will someday rank alongside Henry Morgenthau Jr., Archer Blood and Marshall Harris, 20th century U.S. government officials who took a stand against U.S. policy in response to mass killings abroad."

This year, with good reason, Americans have celebrated the moment 50 years ago when the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans reached a decisive moment: the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery. The movie Selma won an Oscar. President Obama went to Selma and gave one of his finest speeches.

"China's increasingly assertive policies toward its immediate neighborhood shows that Beijing is hardly indifferent to geopolitics, and Russia's assertive defense of what it sees as vital interests in its 'near abroad' (e.g., Ukraine) suggests that somebody in Moscow didn't get the memo about the benign effects of globalization. And regional powers like India, Turkey, and Japan are taking traditional geopolitical concerns more seriously these days. Bottom line: If you thought great-power rivalry was a thing of the past, think again."

NATO after Afghanistan is an organization that suffers from a certain fatigue pertaining to future stabilization challenges. NATO will not automatically cease to conduct operations after 2014, but the level of ambition will be lower. The Afghanistan experience and the failures of the light footprint approach calls for a thinking that is less liberalist "in the abstract" and more focused on provision of basic services (security, development, and governance).

The Belfer Center is honored to have a number of our scholars and alumni prominently featured in the film Countdown to Zero. It is a testament to our long-standing commitment to providing leadership in advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the threat of nuclear terrorism and proliferation. Translating words into deeds, however, will require private citizens to take action. For her work in pushing nations around the world to sign a treaty banning land mines, Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997....Someone asked one of my colleagues here at the Center, what would a nuclear Jody Williams do? Colleagues here have developed a list.

"Based partly on my studies of Muslim youth in the west, I suspect that Shahzad was first influenced by various websites that encourage and propagate extremist religious views, mixing religious bigotry and dogma with conspiracy theories specifically targeting a younger generation of Muslims living in the west."

"The temptation for U.S. policymakers to get involved in the dispute is latent. In October 2008, Barack Obama, a month before he was elected, stated that 'working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way' was among the 'critical tasks for the next administration.' Pakistan, as the irridentist party, would welcome it; indeed, the attacks by Pakistan-sponsored groups in Kashmir and elsewhere in India may be aimed in part in provoking the U.S. to intervene on the dispute."