Free Republic

Fresh off his 2012 re-election victory, President Barack Obama summoned senior advisers to a series of meetings, asking them to “think big” about a second-term agenda, including the possibilities of new starts with long-standing U.S. foes such as Iran and Cuba. Two years later, after painstaking secret diplomacy on separate but surprisingly similar tracks, efforts with Tehran and Havana are in full swing. The nuclear negotiations with Iran continue and are far from a guaranteed success. But Wednesday’s announcement that the U.S. and Cuba will normalize relations after more than 50 years of hostility suggests one of the last chapters...

It is, as foreign policy expert Yogi Berra would put it, a case of "déjà vu all over again." But this time, the weapons of mass destruction menace is Iran. And the question for the Bush administration, struggling with a difficult and still-unfinished war of preemption against Iraq, is how to get it right the second time around. The best advice I've heard for dealing with Iran comes from former CIA analyst David Kay. He's the man who finally uncovered the truth about Iraq's weapons program -- namely that, contrary to the expectations of nearly every intelligence service, it had...

Iraq Crisis March 16th, 2003 Within the past weeks it has apparently been the aim of German foreign policy to isolate America in the United Nations Security Council. This is shown in a confidential wire report of the German UN ambassador, Pleuger. It concerned impeding the latest attempts for consensus with America and, therefore, to force Washington to go it alone against Iraq. The report has been made available to the “Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung”. At the same time, there are considerations in the Federal Government to use the issue of the reconstruction after a war as a means, in the...