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Transnational Issues
The prominence of transnational issues in the first part of the 21st century cannot be understated. Energy politics, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the substantial shift of power from the West to Asia--all are changing the parameters in which policy and investment decisions are formed and executed.
Emerging in the vacuum of sustained and disciplined global leadership, what once were secondary symptoms of international neglect are now driving forces on the international scene and must be addressed both as cause and effect. The great test of American leadership in the coming decades will be whether the United States can move beyond the vicious cycles of reaction to transnational crises and address the root causes that make them so potent.
The American Strategy Program's Transnational Issues cluster of initiatives seeks to understand, demystify, and provide solutions for the critical transnational threats and trends confronting the United States and the international order.
For more on our work on transnational issues, please click on the initiatives below:
The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in
Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing
tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched
uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the
longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking
its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and
economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately
disconnected -- despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a
600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.
Turkey's prime
minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was expected to come to the White House
on Thursday for a meeting with President Barack Obama. Erdogan's visit
has now been postponed, and the decision to postpone comes on the heels
of the Turkish leader's high-profile visit to Iran this week.
The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American
drone warfare program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office,
U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders
along with hundreds of other people, a quarter of whom were civilians.
As
a result of the unprecedented 42 strikes by drone aircraft into
Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and
al Qaeda networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant
organizations have been killed.
We are losing in Afghanistan, on two fronts. The most important
center of gravity of the conflict -- as the Taliban well recognizes --
is the American public. And now, most Americans are opposed to the war.
For
years, Afghanistan was "the forgotten war," and when Americans started
paying attention again -- roughly around the time of President Obama's
inauguration -- what they saw was not a pretty sight: a corrupt Afghan
government, a world-class drug trade, a resurgent Taliban and steadily
rising U.S. casualties.
Over the summer, the Afghan Taliban's military
committee distributed "A Book of Rules," in Pashto, to its fighters.
The book's eleven chapters seem to draw from the population-centric
principles of F.M. 3-24, the U.S. Army's much publicized
counter-insurgency field manual, released in 2006. Henceforth, the
Taliban guide declares, suicide bombers must take "the utmost steps . .
. to avoid civilian human loss." Commanders should generally insure the
"safety and security of the civilian's life and property." Also, lest
As a result of the unprecedented 41 drone strikes into
Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda
networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have
been killed--including two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al
Qaeda, and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban--in addition
to hundreds of lower-level militants and civilians, according to our analysis.[1]
As President Obama receives formal
recommendations in the coming months on issues surrounding the U.S.
military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it is crucial that policymakers and the public have an
accurate picture of the threat to the United States posed by those
detainees already released. Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or
14 percent, of the former prisoners had "returned to the battlefield," our
analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories, and other public records indicates
that the number who were confirmed or suspected to… more
In late May, some 40 Pakistani journalists received a
summons to an unusual press conference held by Baitullah Mehsud, the rarely
photographed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who is accused of orchestrating
the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, sending suicide bombers to Spain
earlier this year, and dispatching an army of fighters into Afghanistan to
attack U.S. and NATO forces in recent months. Surrounded by a posse of heavily
armed Taliban guards, Mehsud boasted that he had hundreds of trained suicide
bombers ready for martyrdom.
The next U.S. president, whether it is John McCain or Barack Obama, should reorient American policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon reoriented American policy toward the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. Nearly three decades of U.S. policy toward Iran emphasizing diplomatic isolation, escalating economic pressure, and thinly veiled support for regime change have damaged the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. U.S.-Iranian tensions have been… more
Join the New America Foundation for a special screening of a powerful new
documentary film directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and journalist Andy
Worthington called "Outside the Law: Stories from
Guantánamo," which follows the stories of three current or former
detainees from Guantanamo Bay and tells the story of Guantanamo, including
segments on extraordinary renditions and secret prisons. With just over two months until President Obama's
deadline for the closure of Guantánamo, and with the administration set to
This conference examined the civilian dimensions of counterterrorism, and took place on October 21, 2009, at the
Mayflower Hotel. A full program agenda is below, as are video recordings from the webcasts of each discussion.
Higher resolution video and an MP3 audio recording will be added here as they become available.
David Loyn, developing world correspondent for the BBC and
author of In Afghanistan: Two Hundred
Years of British, Russian, and American Occupation, expounded upon 200
years of Afghan history as being useful in understanding the problems the U.S.
and NATO currently face there. After declaring that clear thinking is needed on
Afghanistan, and apparently
not currently forthcoming from the Obama Administration, Loyn described his own
ten points the U.S.
must consider when planning its next move in the country. The two primary
At today's launch event for the AfPak Channel, a joint
project between the New America Foundation
and Foreign Policy magazine, a panel
of journalists who have often traveled to the region that U.S. President Barack
Obama has made the focal point of his foreign policy shared their experiences
reporting from Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
On July 23 Seth Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, joined the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen, senior fellow and co-director of the New America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, to discuss Afghanistan and Jones' recently published book, In The Graveyard of Empires.
The prominence of transnational issues in the first part of the 21st century cannot be understated. Energy politics, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the substantial shift of power from the West to Asia--all are changing the parameters in which policy and investment decisions are formed and executed.
