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In a move late Friday, the White House announced two key decisions that have a broad impact and represent a weakening shift within US foreign policy. In consecutive announcements the White House agreed to meet North Korean demands that the US diplomats negotiate with North Korea on a nation-to-nation basis without the presence of the other members of the six-party talks. In addition the State Department also accepted Iranian demands that the United States and a contingency of 5 European nations hold diplomatic negotiations upon a wide range of topics that will not include the dismantling of Iran's nuclear program....

US ready for N Korea direct talks North Korea insists it has a right to nuclear weapons The US says it would hold direct talks with North Korea to persuade it to return to stalled multilateral talks on ending its nuclear programme. A spokesman for the US state department said that there had been no decision on when such talks might take place. Philip Crowley insisted the move was not a policy shift and talks would take place within "the six-party process". North Korea pulled out of multilateral talks in April after international criticism following a rocket launch. "It's a...

WASHINGTON: The US and five partner countries have accepted Iran's new offer to hold talks, even though Iran insists it will not negotiate over its disputed nuclear programme, the State Department said yesterday. Department spokesman P J Crowley said that although Iran's proposal for international talks - presented to the six powers on Wednesday - was disappointing for sidestepping the nuclear issue, it represented a chance to begin a direct dialogue. "We are seeking a meeting now based on the Iranian paper to see what Iran is prepared to do," Crowley said. "And then, as the president has said, you...

Hillsdale College's Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship will be hosting John R. Bolton, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, tomorrow for their monthly First Principles on First Fridays Lecture Series. The event will be held this Friday, September 11, 2009 from 7:30 AM – 8:45 AM at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Auditorium in Washington, D.C. In his address, Ambassador Bolton will deliver a report card on President Obama's Foreign Policy. Follow the lecture live on Twitter by clicking here: http://twitter.com/hillsdale1. To register by September 8, please click here: http://www.hillsdale.edu/firstfridays.asp. For any questions, and to confirm your attendance,...

In all the excitement over Van Jones' resignation, people missed President Obama supporting Communists abroad, as he did at home. Late last week, SSINO (Secretary of State In Name Only) Hillary Clinton met with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and cut off all remaining funds for Honduras' government: $30 million now, and $215 million over four years. Leftists are pushing for the IMF to follow suit. In addition to being part of the Castro-Chavez axis, Zelaya sought to subvert the constitution -- and he stands accused of running drugs. Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez told the press, "Every night, three...

WASHINGTON – European support for the U.S. president's handling of foreign policy has soared since President Barack Obama took over from former President George W. Bush, but Europeans continue to view major issues including Afghanistan, Iran and global warming differently than Americans view them, a poll released Wednesday found. Among those polled in the European Union and Turkey, about three-fourths, on average, said they supported Obama's handling of foreign policy compared with about a fifth who said the same for Bush last year, according to the survey. It was conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a...

Afghanistan is spiraling out of control. Deaths are mounting and the security situation is deteriorating. It's clear we need a new strategy. The General there, General McChrystal, has given his outline. After two of the deadliest months of the war in Afghanistan, the commander of U.S. forces there said Monday that “success is achievable” but will require a change in strategy.

We arrived at the frozen river separating China and North Korea at 5 o'clock on the morning of March 17. The air was crisp and still, and there was no one else in sight. As the sun appeared over the horizon, our guide stepped onto the ice. We followed him.

At a time when security in Afghanistan is worsening and the administration is trying to shore up liberal support for the war, State Department contractors guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul are working in a “Lord of the Flies environment,” a Washington watchdog group told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.

Rich, Kathryn et al, I'm less hostile to the George Will column. It seems to me we have no very clear war aims in Afghanistan, which is never a good position to be in.

Today, the spirit of appeasement is alive and well. Authoritarian states like Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela bully, bluster, build up their forces and project their power. Threatened countries like Israel, Honduras and Georgia -- who in the past might have counted on the U.S. for assistance -- must now seek their own path. The White House ponders grand bargains that will settle the world's problems and placate the aggressors. Our leaders listen, analyze, promise and apologize. All the while, the world's dictators look longingly at maps and contemplate what frontiers previously denied them are slowly beginning to materialize.

The Islamic republic has test-fired missiles capable of reaching Israel, southeastern Europe and U.S. bases in the Mideast, and published reports say Iran is within a year of developing its own nuclear bomb. And security experts warn that even one nuclear device in the hands of a rogue nation could be used against the United States in a devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. So why isn't the Obama administration doing more to prevent a nuclear nightmare? “I get very, very nervous about it,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told Newsmax.TV's Kathleen Walter. “I think Iran will have a nuclear weapon. I...

I hope that President Obama and his family enjoyed their week's vacation on Martha's Vineyard, because what he faces on his return to Washington is sheer hell. Obama confronted a daunting situation when he took office back in January, with a sickening economic slide and the real threat of financial crisis. But he was buoyed then by the momentum of his historic election victory and the widespread hope that it stirred -- even among those who had not voted for him. He launched a series of ambitious initiatives and, while only the economic stimulus package came to quick fruition, there...

After vowing not to become involved in recriminations over the Bush anti-terror policies, President Obama has allowed his Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to dig up all the dirt he can find on the CIA and the anti-terror investigators whose aggressive questioning saved us from countless attacks

I'm hearing today that the Obama administration is pretty much going to pull the rug out from under Poland and Czechoslovakia as it relates to the U.S. anti-missile system that was going to be installed in those two countries, and that they kind of stuck their necks out for us to support. How NOT surprising that this decision -- undertaken to somehow "reset" our relationship with Russia -- happened sooner, rather than later. It's been no secret that Barack Obama and most committed leftists absolutely hate the idea of concerted missile defenses, which they consider to be destabilizing in the...

Ambassador John Bolton will be addressing the First Principles on First Fridays monthly lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale College's Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on September 11, 2009 in The Allison Auditorium at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Ambassador Bolton will be speaking on "Obama's Foreign Policy: A Report Card". To RSVP, please go to http://www.hillsdale.edu/firstfridays.asp or call 202-248-5084 and ask for Jennifer Powell.

"We're All Realists Now." No. Pragmatists maybe, but not "realists." Barack Obama's election as U.S. president delighted many people, especially the self-described foreign-policy "realists" who accused his predecessor, George W. Bush, of denying reality in favor of dangerous idealism. Obama has praised the realpolitik of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. And a White House official recently told the Wall Street Journal, "[Obama] has really kind of clicked with that old-school, end-of-the-Cold-War wise-men generation." The elder Bush's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, called Obama's election a rejection of the younger Bush "in favor of realism." Of course foreign policy should be...

In honor of the Mary Jo Kopechne Memorial Brain Tumor completing its task, here is Herb Rommerstein's exposé of Ted Kennedy's traitorous collaboration with the Soviet KGB, originally published in Human Events in December 2003. Following Mr. Romerstein's article is the full text of the letter he references from KGB head Viktor Chebrikov to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov regarding Mr. Kennedy's collaboration with the KGB.Even long-time Bush watchers were surprised when former President [George H. W.] Bush presented an award to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) at a time when the far-left senator was involved in a full-scale series of attacks...

Since he left office, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney has been waging a lonesome jihad to defend the practices of the Bush administration during the "war on terror," saying in an emblematic interview in February: "If it hadn't been for what we did -- with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth -- then we would have been attacked again. ... Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the...

The governor of New Jersey and two lawmakers are protesting Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's expected stay in the Garden State next month, saying families of the victims of the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, shouldn't have to play host to the attackers' benefactor.

Before you try to line up this insanity with the old Inquisition garbage on destroying the sinner's body to save the soul - that's not what's happening here. This isn't a theocratic justification for torture, which would almost be too clean and honest for these cretins. That's the kind of spectacle that, for better or worse, you still have to own.

The mayor of the North Jersey town where Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi might stay next month during a diplomatic visit to nearby New York City blasted federal officials on Tuesday, from members of Congress all the way up to President Barack Obama, for not doing enough to stop the visit.

The New York Times seems to feel that there are two sides to the charges in a Swedish newspaper that the IDF kills Palestinians and takes their organs for transplants. Read Accusation of Organ Theft Stokes Ire in Israel. "Stokes Ire?" Is that what's news?

Iraq's foreign minister said Saturday that those who carried out bombings that targeted government buildings in the Iraqi capital received help to pull off the attacks, possibly from Iraqi security forces.

Resurrecting Religion It was a commonplace of the late 1960s that religion was obsolete and that modern 20th-century people had no need of faith. "Is God Dead?" Time asked in 1966, and books such as The Gospel of Christian Atheism seemed to prove that religion was something modern people could confidently ignore. In the 1990s, books such as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man explained to intellectuals that religion was as dead as Communism (or history). The Economist even decided to commemorate the millennium by publishing God's obituary. But in our century, religious news is, more...

Greg Palkot reported from Afghanistan with an interesting report in anticipation of the election. Palkot walked the streets of Kabul asking potential voters what Ronald Reagan asked in 1980 "are you better off than you were 5 years ago". To gauge public opinion, we paraphrased the old Ronald Reagan campaign slogan and asked the folks here "are you better off now than you were five years ago?" when President Karzai was first elected? (voice-over): The reaction was decidedly mixed -- some positive. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have had more improvements in Afghanistan in education parts and every kind of development.

We don’t need to “reinvent” conservatism, but we certainly do need to reacquaint millions of Americans—especially the young—with what conservatives believe about many issues. And foreign policy is an arena where conservative vision is most needed today. If anyone had said in 1981 that Ronald Reagan would end the Cold War by building up U.S. military strength, by challenging the Soviet Union, by publicly denouncing Soviet tyranny while quietly waging relentless economic warfare against an evil empire, and even by holding Soviet communism up to international ridicule, that person would have been deemed a starry-eyed visionary. Yet that was Reagan’s...

We're all now familiar with this viral exchange between Secretary Clinton and a questioner in Africa

By now, most people know that the Iranian regime treats its dissidents with unrestrained barbarity. Even the leading dead tree media have reported anecdotally on the torture of prisoners and the bashing, beating, axing and stabbing of protestors in the streets of the major cities. But it is not easy to get a clear picture of the dimensions of the savagery. It’s hard to get the real numbers on the bloody repression the mullahs have unleashed on their people, and one reason–perhaps the most important one–is that the regime is doing everything in its power to conceal the facts, typically...

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- An appeals court commuted the death sentences for four men convicted of killing an American diplomat and his Sudanese driver after the driver's family decided to pardon the murderers, a news agency reported Thursday. Sudanese law stipulates that if a victim's family chooses to pardon the murderer, the person cannot be sentenced to death and the prison term cannot exceed 10 years. The case will be referred back to the initial court for a new sentence, said the Sudan Media Center.

Obama asks you to report your neighbors for any anti-Obamacare "disinformation." Seems the next thing he wants to take over is speech. Nancy Pelosi finds comparisons of ObamaCare to the Nazi state beyond the pale. So she accuses critics of ObamaCare of being Nazis. Read an objection to the Obama-as-Joker poster that the Joker wasn't a socialist. But the Joker was an evil, destructive force. Destructive force Barack Hussein Obama, the ayatollahs' ally, has designated Ahmadinejad the "elected leader." Obama mouthpiece Robert Gibb first called Ahmadinejad Iran's "elected leader," then said "it's not for me to pass judgment." Ralph Peters...

Remember all those polls during the Presidential Campaign, how Europe desperately wanted Barack Obama to win. How the European leadership fawned over Obama when he made his summer tour tour around the world? One of the President's campaign promises was that he was going to "repair" our relationship with Europe (as if they needed to be repaired). Ever since he was inaugurated, President Obama has done his best to diss our allies in Europe. There was that famous "non joint press conference" when Gordon Brown came to visit, refusing Nicolas Sarkozy offer to share a meal when Obama was a...

Unless Iran responds positively to President Obama's offer of talks on its nuclear program by next month, it could face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "crippling sanctions." That was the message from Administration officials touring the Middle East in recent weeks. And it's backed by congressional moves to pass legislation aimed at choking off the gasoline imports on which Iran relies for almost a third of its consumption, by punishing third-country suppliers. It sounds impressive and, for an undiversified economy like Iran's, potentially calamitous. But a number of Iran analysts are skeptical that new sanctions will break the...

America's chief diplomat sounds off on Iran, North Korea and Team ObamaIn a wide-ranging interview taped while she was in Nairobi last week, Hillary Clinton on “Fareed Zakaria GPS” said that her differences with Obama during the campaign were "maybe [a] difference in degree, not kind," and said she had no worries about foreign policy power moving from the State Department to the White House, noting, "I'm not exactly a shrinking violet." She also defended her husband's mission to North Korea, and dismissed the claim by Bush's ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, that Clinton's trip encouraged hostage-taking and...

Ever since former President Bill Clinton came back from North Korea with two freed American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, there has been some debate as to whether or not the trip was wise. The most prominent critic of the trip was John Bolton. The symbolism of a former president going to meet with Kim Jong Il I think is something that benefits Kim Jong Il a lot more than the United States, and it only encourages others to do the same thing," John Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Madeleine Brand.

“Let me correct a little bit of what I said yesterday,” Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Indiana. “I denoted that Mr. Ahmadinejad was the elected leader of Iran. I would say it’s not for me to pass judgment on.” Gibbs said it is a fact that Ahmadinejad had been inaugurated. He was sworn in for a second four-year term Wednesday. The ceremony in Iran’s parliament was boycotted by opposition leaders who accuse the regime of rigging the June election. “Whether any election was fair, obviously the Iranian people still have questions about that and we’ll...

Former President Bill Clinton met Tuesday with the two journalists jailed in North Korea, as he wrapped up the first day of his high-stakes mission to win their release. A U.S. official confirmed to FOX News that Clinton met with Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the reporters sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor after North Korea accused them of sneaking into the country illegally and engaging in "hostile acts."

Cheney is far and away the most effective, persuasive Republican on the issue of national security. And, as noted by Ben Smith, she is sounding more and more like a candidate. Just let me know where to send the check.

John McCain is red in the face and hopping mad. I’m sitting in his office in the Senate Russell Office Building, and he’s just rushed in after delivering a speech on the Senate floor where he seethed about the earmarks in the Homeland Security Bill.

As Abe Greenwald has noted, Obama lacks a foreign policy ideology. Michael Gerson makes the case that it’s worse than that: But even lacking an ideology, the administration does have a doctrine. The defining principle of President Obama’s foreign policy is engagement with America’s adversaries. Much of the president’s public diplomacy has been designed to clear a path for such talks — expressing respect for legitimate grievances, apologizing for past wrongs and offering dialogue without preconditions.Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, the doctrine is on its deathbed. Let us start by pointing out...

Are proponents of a robust American military seeing their worst nightmares come true? The military will need to come up with $60 billion in savings over the next five years to pay for new priorities to be set by the Defense secretary, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday. The order from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is based on an assumption that there will be no real growth in defense budgets over the next five years, a radical departure for a department whose budgets have increased more than 80 percent since 2001. […] One of the driving factors so far...

God love Joe Biden. Every time he opens his mouth, a gaffe of some dimension falls out of it, giving us a steady stream of material. In this clip, Biden makes a momentary mistake of bragging about cutting pay checks rather than payroll taxes, but makes the far bigger mistake of repeating ad nauseam about Porkulus critics, “What would they do?” At times, it almost seemed as though Joe broke TOTUS again and his text wouldn’t move.

Here is a video report on comments by Vice-President Joe Biden about Russia that is causing concern in the Obama Administration, including for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Talking about Russia recently, Biden described problems within the country and said: "They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years." For once, I agree with Joe Biden. What he said is true, but it may not be very diplomatic to say so. This is especially concerning in an administration...

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has urged Iran to respond to US diplomatic overtures by September. His Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak indicated that military action remained an option on Iran, following talks between the two in Jerusalem. Senior US officials are engaged in a drive to breathe new life into faltering regional peace moves. US envoy George Mitchell met Egypt's Hosni Mubarak for talks and will meet the Palestinian president later. He has already been in Syria, drumming up regional support for the new US initiative. Both Mr Mitchell and Mr Gates - as well as two other senior US...

By common consent, the most memorable moment of Barack Obama's otherwise listless press conference on "health care" were his robust remarks on the "racist" incident involving professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police. The latter "acted stupidly," pronounced the chief of state. The president of the United States may be reluctant to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to the plate and speak truth to power. And thank God the leader of...

International diplomacy has failed to end Iran's nuclear program, halt its support for terrorist groups or force the regime to respect basic human rights. But a new strategy is at hand: In a four-part National Post series, presented in partnership with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, prominent writers explain how the world can apply pressure on Iran. In today's instalment, Irwin Cotler urges Canada to contribute to this effort. Last month's elections in Iran shone a light on domestic repressions that critics of the ruling regime have been observing for decades. What the world has seen in the...

On July 15, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared before the Council on Foreign Relations, the much maligned organization often at the center of many global conspiracy theories. We won’t talk about the merits of the CFR itself, here, but what made me curious is the treatment that MSNBC gave the Clinton speech. It appears that MSNBC edited out Clinton’s opening statement thanking the CFR for having her. When reading what she said at the outset of the speech one might become suspicious that MSNBC was trying to provide cover for the Secretary of State whose comments opened her up...

Michael Rubin testifies at House Foreign Affairs Committee (excerpt) Secretary Clinton is correct to note the challenges the Islamic Republic poses, but is incorrect to blame her predecessors rather than the Islamic Republic itself for the failure of diplomacy. It is a myth that the United States has not engaged Iran. Every administration since Jimmy Carter's has engaged the Islamic Republic. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan criticized the Carter administration's diplomacy toward Iran but then, faced with his own Iranian-instigated hostage crisis, also sought to offer incentives. During his inaugural address, George H.W. Bush extended an olive branch...

The Senate on Tuesday voted to strip $1.75 billion on seven additional F-22 jets that President Obama said was unnecessary and would doom a $680 bill authorizing defense spending plans for the coming fiscal year. The 58-40 vote prevents Obama from carrying out a threat to use the first veto of his presidency if senators had kept the designation in the defense bill.

Energized Alliances by: Mytheos Holt, July 20, 2009 This Wednesday, the Brookings Institution convened three panels of experts to discuss the new relationship between Russia and Turkey, whose history of hostilities has apparently abruptly ground to a halt. Every panel featured scholars from both Russia and Turkey, and were briefly interrupted for keynote address by Richard Morningstar, special envoy for Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. “Russia today is Turkey’s largest trading partner,” said Stephen Larrabee of the RAND Corporation. “This has introduced into Turkish foreign policy a desire to avoid, if possible, clashes with Russia.” Offering a...