Wednesday marks one year since Navy Seal Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. He won’t be missed here in the United States. And according to the latest poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, he won’t be missed much in Muslim-majority countries either.

Pew asked Muslims in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” view of al-Qaeda. Read more »

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden; the upcoming U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing; UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s visit to Myanmar; and Liberation Day in Vietnam. Read more »

Joe Biden gets ribbed for being long-winded. But in a speech this morning at New York University he offered a pithy summary of what looks to be the Obama campaign’s “sales pitch” on foreign policy. Read more »

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko earlier this month released a prominent political opponent and his aide from prison. The move looks to have been in response to tough travel bans and asset freezes that the European Union (EU) has imposed on Belarus. My colleague, Anya Schmemann, keeps a close eye on events in the former Soviet Union, so I asked for her assessment. She had this to say: Read more »

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the presidential elections in France; Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika’s funeral; the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster; and Earth Day. Read more »

Americans love generals. We have elected twelve of them president. But for a president, generals can be an enormous pain—and a political threat. James K. Polk worried (rightly) that Winfield Scott was hankering after his job. Abraham Lincoln couldn’t get George B. McClellan to fight, finally relieved him of command of the Army of the Potomac, and then beat him decisively in the 1864 election. Read more »

I noted in a post this morning that Americans have less confidence in Mitt Romney than Barack Obama when it comes to foreign policy. Moments after that post went up the Pew Research Center released a new poll.  It shows the challenge Romney faces in closing the gap with the president on foreign policy. Read more »

I’ve spent most of my time the past two weeks discharging my administrative responsibilities rather than following the news. With the stack of papers piled in my inbox now looking to be just daunting rather than terrifying, I decided to catch up on the news. So far most of what I have read has been unsurprising. The Syrian government agreed to a cease-fire and then broke it. North Korea promised not to launch a long-range missile and then did just that. Iran offered to talk about a nuclear deal while continuing to intimidate its neighbors.  People behaved badly when they went abroad or visited Las Vegas.  All are essentially dog-bites-man stories. Read more »

“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” is a rather bland title for a report. Especially one that turns out to help drive history. But that’s the formal name given to NSC-68, the foundational document for America’s Cold War strategy. It was issued by President Harry Truman’s National Security Council for review on April 14, 1950.* Read more »