Claudette Roulo, “Dempsey Arrives in Afghanistan to Assess Progress,” American Forces Press Service, April 6, 2013.

“Any conflict in history, when it is resolved, is resolved through some form of reconciliation,” [Gen. Martin Dempsey chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] said. “I support the effort to try … through the Afghans to encourage them to take reconciliation as an important line of effort.” Read more »

Senator Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was a protracted, repetitive, and disappointing affair. Rather than discuss the decisions for which the secretary of defense is empowered by U.S. law to make and implement as the “principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to the Department of Defense,” the hearing focused instead on forcing the former Nebraska senator to defend or deny his previous statements and positions. Read more »

Gregory D. Johnsen is a former Fulbright fellow in Yemen and currently a PhD candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia and writes the blog Waq al-Waq. Read more »

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I believe that, faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down.” (September 27, 2012) Read more »

On Monday, the five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council reaffirmed their promise not to attack Mongolia with nuclear weapons. In 1995, each of the P5 pledged not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear weapons states that signed and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); this was solidified when the Security Council voted 15-0 to pass Resolution 984.  In October 2000, the P5 specifically extended this “negative security assurance” to Mongolia when it declared its nuclear weapons-free status. Read more »

Saxby Chambliss, “The Threat From Within to Our National Security,” Macon Telegraph, August 3, 2012.

Our nation and our military are about to confront one of the biggest threats since World War II. It does not come in the form of a shadowy terrorist organization or a well-armed foreign foe. Instead, it is looming in the form of indiscriminate budget cuts that will strike on Jan. 1, 2013. Read more »

The most important unanswered question about the heightened U.S.-Israel confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program is whether Iran’s political leadership will decide to pursue a nuclear weapon. The key judgments in the last declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program found with “high confidence” that “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” in the fall of 2003, and this conviction remained with “moderate confidence” through mid-2007. Read more »

The headline of today’s Washington Post reads, “Iran Expands Ability to Strike U.S. Navy in Gulf.” The piece describes Persian Gulf war games, paranoid comments by regional officials, and hollow threats from Iranian officials. Read more »

Matthew Fuhrmann is assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M University and a former Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Atomic Assistance: How “Atoms for Peace” Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity. Read more »

Despite almost ten years of operations and nearly four hundred airstrikes that killed an estimated three thousand people (both militants and civilians), both the Bush and Obama administrations have provided limited information about U.S. targeted killings policies. The scope and intensity of the strikes represent an undeclared Third War beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, for which policymakers offer adjectives (“surgical,” “discriminate,” targeted,” and “precise”) but refuse to directly address any questions. According to White House spokesperson Jay Carney in February, “I’m not going to discuss broadly or specifically supposed covert programs.” Read more »