Iran: Economic Sanctions Success Story?

Economic sanctions don't always get the best rap. Frustrated Middle East watchers and myriad Obama critics point to Iran as proof that sanctions aren't coercive, but the detractors may have spoken too soon.

FP's The Cable blog (which, incidentally, has impressed me with its coverage of the Syrian chemical weapons story) put up a new piece this Friday on the reputation of Hasan Rouhani, Iran's new president, in the US intelligence community. Former IC officials who met Rouhani during the Reagan administration say he struck them as a genuine moderate.

If they're right, his election could be a first step toward real progress on ending Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. But the article also mentions another contributing factor: the UN sanctions regime.

WikiLeaks continues to be harmful in a different way than it thinks it is

The latest Wikileaks "scandal," a dump of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables and other documents, is alleged by many in the press and assumed by much of the public to be extremely revelatory and shocking. In fact, very, very little, if anything, in the leak, has surprised anyone who's been paying even a minimum of attention to international news over the past 8-12 months.

What in this leak is actually surprising news?

Where's the foreign policy Obama promised?

It's not an uncommon practice for politicians to not live up to their promises.  And I admit, I've been reluctant to give up the hope that I had for President Obama.  However, of the eve of mid-term elections, things have started to look pretty grim for the Democrats.

Foreign Policy has published a scorecard of the Obama administration's foreign policy.  And while he has two years before he is put to the test of the voters once more (and two years is admittedly a long time), the article above is a very good account of how things sit on the ground right now, albeit not entirely a measure of how the next Presidential election is slated to go.  As he points out, Obama may not be the best, but the GOP has yet to field a better candidate.

Honduras: One Year Later

          A little over a year out from the coup of June 2009, Honduras remains in turmoil, the US's interests in the area remain unserved, and violent oppression is the order of the day. The US appears to be without an attractive foreign policy option. Our ham-handed attempts to have Manuel Zelaya reinstated gained us nothing, and lost us political capital in the region. However, the status quo under President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo is unacceptable; human rights are trampled on a regular basis, and the government is, at best, unconcerned, and at worst, responsible. What the US needs to do is take a far subtler approach to our intervention in Latin American politics, and make the best of a government in Honduras that we may well be stuck with.