Foreign Policy
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Given the significance of the recent (April 12) Hungarian elections, I put together a quick analysis for the Foreign Policy Research Institute of their ramifications for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The piece went live today and can be accessed here. I will also be posting a second article—for the local papers—on this blog…
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As the Persian Gulf war enters its second month, President Trump continues to frequently vacillate between threatening more “fire and brimstone” on the Iranians and proclaiming that the two sides are on the cusp of a major agreement to end the fighting. As of this writing (29 March), hostilities persist between the primary combatants in…
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The American and Israeli joint strike against Iran, beginning with the 1 March assassination of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has plunged the entire Middle East into a violent vortex with seemingly no end on the horizon. The hostilities, called “A War Without Strategy” in the 7 March edition of the Economist, have…
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The Foreign Policy Research Institute published this morning another of my analytic pieces on Central Europe, this time on the Czech Republic. If interested, the article can be found here. I had not planned to write another newspaper article for a few weeks but the Middle East war certainly deserves my attention. Consequently, I may…
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While the Beatles feature in the title of this commentary, the lyrics from another British rock and roll band offer a practical framework as the warring sides in the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe probe for an acceptable offramp after four years of bloodshed. You can’t always get what you want But if you try…
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At a recent speech in Detroit, President Trump summed up his first year in office thusly: “I told you we were going to do a lot of things, Nobody thought it was going to turn out like this. This has been crazy.” When it comes to Trump 2.0’s foreign policy over the past 12 months,…
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In a Mar-a-Lago press conference on the morning of January 3rd, President Trump stated that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a proper transition to a new government can occur. The president’s announcement came in the wake of a lightning U.S. military raid on Caracas, leading to the apprehension on drug-related charges of Venezuelan…
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It was a decidedly down year for democracy across the globe. From the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to the smouldering conflicts in south and southeast Asia to the coup-infected states of sub-Saharan Africa to America’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean, the putative gold standard of representative government took a beating over the past twelve months. …
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The world is brimming with crises. Leaders across the globe are burning the midnight oil, trying to find acceptable solutions to seemingly intractable strategic dilemmas, from the ongoing bloodshed in the historic lands of Kievan Rus to the unsettled prospects for a lasting peace in the Middle East to the dangerous sabre-rattling between Tokyo and…
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The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), the Philadelphia-based think tank for which I write periodically, yesterday published my latest analytic missive on political developments in the Czech Republic. For anyone interested, the article can be accessed here.
Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog 