Campaign '08: Obama's Foreign Policy Advisers | Newsweek The Council on Foreign Relations

Between Delhi and D.C.
Sumit Ganguly 5/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
Since the Congress Party's huge win in India's elections was announced on May 16, pundits across the country and in the United States have predicted that the warming relations between Delhi and D.C. are now sure to grow even closer. After all, Congress has finally rid itself of the troublesome coalition partners that were holding it back; surely now it will press forward on the issues that matter most to Washington, such as strengthening the two countries' budding security partnership.
Barack Versus Business
Michael Freedman 5/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama may turn out to be the most anti-big-business president in decades. His gentle bank bailouts are obscuring a get-tough stand on corporations, particularly abroad. Obama's choice for U.S. trade representative was the mayor of Dallas, with scant trade experience, suggesting the administration has little real interest in pushing the corporate case for free trade. The Justice Department has vowed to aggressively prosecute companies for bribing foreign officials, even though global money flows are falling and few other nations go after foreign bribery with anywhere near the zeal of the United States. Obama trumpets his ability to prioritize, but personally announced a crackdown on corporate abuse of overseas tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In doing so, he was making good on a campaign promise to rein in what he called "the biggest tax scam on record," but it is hardly a key to the global crisis. And last week his administration signaled plans to go out and break up monopolies, the way the Europeans do. In laying out the Justice Department's strategy, its new antitrust top cop, Christine A. Varney, said Americans were led to believe that markets should be allowed to "self-police" and that they will correct themselves, but that has not happened. Government, she said, "cannot sit on the sidelines any longer." It may be that Obama needs to show a tough side to Americans worried about the trillions he's spent to save the banks. Or it may be that America has not seen a president this skeptical of big business since Teddy Roosevelt first started busting trusts.
Unsilent Barack
George F. Will 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
A 19th-century historian called the Middle Ages "a thousand years without a bath." That oversimplified somewhat, but was interestingly suggestive. So is the summation of Obama's opening sprint as 100 days without silence.
CUBA
Tear Down This Wall
Patrick Symmes 4/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
Dayana Mendoza, the delightful Miss Universe 2008, took a tour of Guantánamo Bay Naval Station recently. After seeing the detainee camps, the showers and a dog-handling demonstration, she called the 45-square-mile U.S. base on Cuba's eastern flank a "calm and beautiful" destination. Guantánamo was "really enjoyable," Mendoza said; she "didn't want to leave."
GLOBAL TOUR
One More Chance
Daniel W. Drezner 3/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
A lot is riding on the London summit of G20 heads of state scheduled for next week. International regimes can develop reputations for not mattering in a short span of time. Multilateral bodies that that seem feckless or hypocritical quickly devolve into meaningless talking shops. Right now, the G20 is on the precipice of irrelevance.
EXPERT OPINION
Advice for Obama
7/19/2008 12:00:00 AM
Sometime near the beginning of what many here hope will be the first of Obama's two terms, and at the latest in 2010, the British government will most probably change from Labour to Conservative, from Gordon Brown to David Cameron. But Washington needn't worry: the next lot will be even more pro-American than the last. The Tories adore Obama, NATO, New York and American ways of doing almost everything. A Conservative government will, like the Blair and Brown ones, share Obama's insistence on taking a long-term, multifaceted approach to combating terrorism and his emphasis on the importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Britain's armed forces are overstretched and underfunded, but they will still help America as best they can, especially in Afghanistan. London is the place to have a conversation about a joint political, military and economic strategy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. We have been in those places before. And we're there in several ways now—not just militarily but through our many new Brits of Pakistani origin who live mentally, if not physically, in both countries.