Foreign Policy

On the one hand, anything Kim Kardashian does shouldn’t be news. On the other hand, it usually is, so why not use her celebrity to push another point? I’m writing about Kardashian’s recent tweets on Israel and from Bahrain, and what the ensuing teapot-sized tempest tell us about elites, Arabs, and the magic of social media. 

Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, a possible nominee to be the next secretary of state, came to Capitol Hill Tuesday to perform a private mea culpa to key Republican senators for her erroneous initial public statements about the perpetrators of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in September in which four Americans were killed.

It didn't work.

One of the most high-profile appointments President Obama will make in his second term is the director of the CIA. Here's a tip for the president: The time is ripe for the first woman to head the agency.

Choosing a woman isn't just about narrowing the intelligence community gender gap. It's also about drawing from the whole pool of talent to ensure the best national security apparatus and responding to Americans' apparent desire for more women in government. Here are the Top 10 reasons President Obama should name a woman as the next CIA director.

 In choosing a new CIA director to replace David Petraeus, President Barack Obama has a range of well-qualified candidates to choose from, although some of the most qualified were in management roles at the CIA when controversial interrogation techniques were used by agency interrogators questioning al Qaeda prisoners and the CIA was maintaining secret prisons overseas to detain members of al Qaeda.

Michael Morell, a three-decade veteran of the CIA, is now the acting director of the agency and a leading contender to become the next director of central intelligence.

Historians will likely judge David Petraeus to be the most effective American military commander since Eisenhower.

He was, after all, the person who, more than any other, brought Iraq back from the brink of total disaster after he assumed command of U.S. forces there in 2007.

To understand how daunting a task that was, recall that when Petraeus took over in Iraq, the country was embroiled in a civil war so vicious that civilians were dying at the rate of 90 a day.

New York can be as compelling in a hurricane as it is on a starry Saturday night. Some of the thrill of living in the city arises from its combination of majesty and vulnerability. Coming to terms with apocalyptic scenes is easier here than in other cities because the scenes have already been imagined, scripted and filmed by Hollywood’s dystopian directors. We step outside this week as if onto a familiar movie set.

The apparent political dead-end in the Middle East Peace Process combined with a deepening apartheid-like reality on the ground, has reached a degree where many Palestinians and Israelis are asking not can the two-state solution be salvaged but should it? And, perhaps more urgently, what may be the alternatives? Khaled Elgindy, Fellow at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Leila Hilal, Director of New America’s Middle East Task Force, moderated a discussion on this critical question with Omar Dajani at the New America Foundation.

The final Presidential debate, devoted to foreign policy, was the most reasoned and the least polluted by rehearsed talking points of the three. The format and the moderator helped: the candidates sat side by side at a table, close to Bob Schieffer, of CBS News, who conducts interviews of this kind every Sunday morning on “Face the Nation”; his confidence showed, and the roundtable feeling seemed to calm everyone down.

The United States has lost its bearings in the world. Our foreign policy clings to a host of antiquated assumptions and no guiding strategic vision. It’s a bipartisan confusion, judging by this week’s foreign policy debate between President Obama and Governor Romney. The two men may have gotten personal in their sparring, but neither questioned the other’s assumptions about the places that matter most to Washington.