With Washington, its partners, and interested neighbors gearing up diplomatic efforts over Afghanistan, I’d like to remind readers what George Shultz wrote in his memoirs about the previous Afghan “settlement.” The 1988 Geneva accords, reached under the auspices of the United Nations, took six years of tortured negotiations. As Secretary Shultz recounted in Turmoil and …
Bolton and DeSutter on INF
by | 2011-08-15 | 16 Comments
John Bolton and Paula DeSutter have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Cold War Missile Treaty That’s Doing Us Harm” that calls for the US to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. I found it perplexing that an article subtitled “The U.S.-Soviet INF pact doesn’t address the Iranian threat” …
Forecasting Proliferation
by | 2011-08-11 | 9 Comments
Alex George, the much-admired Stanford University professor, wrote Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (1993) to encourage academia to produce more policy-relevant work. This divide has become wider in subsequent years. Hard-pressed government officials rarely look to academe for help with proliferation. They usually don’t have the time or patience for theorems …
“Monkey with a Grenade”
by | 2011-08-10 | 17 Comments
Officially, the entire country is dry. But our people are highly skilled. Some of the stills I saw there were works of art. —Aleksandr Bolgarov describing how Russian personnel at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant cope with Prohibition in Iran Aleksandr Bolgarov is a Russian engineer who spent two years at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant …
