Foreign Policy

The North Koreans can be such a pain, so wearying, you wish that you could just ignore them. So let’s do that. Let’s ignore them. For the moment, it might be, strategically, the best thing we can do.

Their latest escapade, which some analysts have since hyped as a threat and harbinger of crisis, was the attempt on April 13 to launch a missile into space. (Pyongyang’s foreign ministry insisted that the payload was merely a peaceful satellite, but this was a ruse and, in any case, irrelevant: A rocket that can spin a satellite into orbit can also release a nuclear warhead.)

The short fallings of US internet policy and national security rhetoric in a world where information and technological developments are more easily collected and shared around the world are topics for this week’s episode of The Sidebar.  Host Pamela Chan is joined by Thomas Gideon from the Open Technology Initiative and Konstantin Kakaes from the Schwartz Fellows Program. 

5:08 PM: Welceom [sic] to my life. Press has right to film me anywhere. But do they have a right to read my email and listen to my phone?

5:14 PM: When I asked these "reporters" how they knew my schedule, I got no answer. Heard the same silence when they met me after meeting w/[Anatoly] Chubais.

1:15 AM: Just watched NTV. I mispoke [sic] in bad Russian. Did not mean to say "wild country." Meant to say NTV actions "wild." I greatly respect Russia.

-- U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, on Twitter, March 29–30, 2012

America's longest running war -- the one against drugs -- came in for abuse this weekend at the Summit of the Americas. The abuse is deserved. Forty years of increasingly violent efforts to stamp out the drug trade haven't worked. And the blood and treasure lost is on a scale with America's more conventional wars. On the upside, we know that an approach based around treating drugs as a public health issue reaps benefits to both users and the rest of us.

“The only thing that matters in the world is China, Russia and Europe. Latin America doesn’t matter. Consciously. People don’t give one damn about Latin America now.” That was the assessment President Richard Nixon shared with a young White House aide named Donald Rumsfeld when the latter expressed an interest in bolstering his foreign policy experience. Nixon was speaking a mere decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, at a time when Communists were taking over in Chile and acting up in South America.

In my last post, I wrote about the recent National Intelligence Council report on global water security. Here’s the gist of it:

The gripping account of the decade-long hunt for the world's most wanted man.

"An electronic curtain has fallen around Iran," U.S. President Barack Obama warned in a recent video message marking the Persian New Year. Government censorship and surveillance, he said, make it more difficult for Iranians to "access the information that they want," denying "the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with the Iranian people."

Much fuss has been stirred over President Obama’s open-mic remark to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he’ll have more “space” and “flexibility” to negotiate the dispute over missile defense after he’s reelected.

Several Republicans have charged that his remark reflects a secret plan to “sell out” the U.S. missile-defense program and thus “capitulate” to the Russians (who, Mitt Romney seems to believe, are still “our No. 1 geopolitical foe”).

New York City continues to face a real and persistent terrorist threat that demands a well-coordinated response from law enforcement agencies. But institutions that safeguard public safety cannot function effectively over the longrun without the confidence of the people they serve, and — following a series of revelations about aggressive NYPD monitoring of the city’s Muslim community — that is now in jeopardy.