I recently had the privilege of attending the swearing-in ceremony for my friend and former New America Foundation colleague Karen Kornbluh who recently was confirmed as the new US Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice offered comments both on the personal and professional side of her relationship with Kornbluh that were remarkable in what they conveyed about Kornbluh's impact on President Obama's policy course.

After the comments posted above, Ambassador Rice swore Kornbluh in -- and on a later occasion, I will post Karen Kornbluh's comments and other parts of the ceremony.

Although I thought Ambassador Rice's comments are richly textured, thoughtful and quite worth listening to in their entirety, I found this slice particularly important:

Karen [Kornbluh], however, is famous in this town for her cutting edge scholarship and her eloquent advocacy on behalf of work life balance. . . Karen works extremely hard. I mean crazy hard -- but she also works "smart."

But as the trusted policy director in President Obama's Senate office, Karen brought together leading minds in business, technology, science, economics, energy, and foreign policy in freewheeling and insightful exchanges.

And these dialogues she organized generated the groundbreaking ideas that have truly and profoundly shaped the President's thinking and many of his subsequent policy initiatives in the Senate, the campaign, and now in the administration.

Karen has that extraordinary combination of intellect and creativity that lets her bring these big minds and even bigger personalities together.

She gets them to check their egos at the door and work together to craft innovative solutions to complex challenges both at home or abroad

In 2008, Karen changed forever the way that major political parties write their platforms by breaking free of the stale old conference rules and reaching out directly to the American people.

As the lead author of the Democratic Party platform, she organized 1600 hearings across the country to create a truly open source approach to producing a new blueprint for America's future.

I was proud to get to work with Karen on a portion of that platform, the foreign policy piece. I was constantly impressed, not only by her tireless energy, but by her truly visionary approach.

She got ordinary Americans involved in a process and harnessed their extraordinary ideas.

So that is Karen's unique genius - devising her own brilliant ideas and raising up other peoples' creativity

And it served her well -- across a variety of public and private sector jobs. . .

My apologies for the lackluster sound quality. When I got to the Treaty Room of the Department of State that Friday morning, I could immediately see by who was in the room and the positive feeling in the air that the event should be recorded -- and pulled out my handy "flip video" to get what I could.

Congratulations Karen and family -- and thanks to Susan Rice for making this ceremony one of substance as well as honor and celebration.

-- Steve Clemons

Anyone who knows New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson knows he can be a handful, can be complicated, and can too often want the story about him more than others. Those are characteristics of most who aspire to the presidency.

However, this week during his trip to Cuba allegedly for agricultural trade promotion reasons, Governor Richardson demonstrated why he is such a vital national asset in America's diplomatic game.

Richardson has a knack for dealing with the harder challenges in international affairs -- often extracting American captives from totalitarian regimes but also understanding that in some cases what the game is about is not getting some journalist or innocent released from a gulag but rather using that engagement to create "possibilities" in America's engagement with that nation that did not exist before.

My devout Republican friend Phil Peters writes at his blog, The Cuban Triangle, about RIchardson's recent diplomatic foray to Havana very positively.

Peters reports (and here is a good CBS News clip of some of this in Richardson's press conference):

1. Governor Richardson concludes his visit by saying he will report to President Obama and by offering to set up a dialogue between the Cuban government and Cuban Americans.

2. Richardson urges Cuba to act, "especially in the humanitarian area," and wants both Washington and Havana to ease travel restrictions. "Normalizing relations is going to take time, it is a complicated thing and there are a lot of issues to address...It will take time, but we have to do it," he said.

3. Richardson said that the United States has suggested that the two governments drop restrictions on their diplomats' movements, and he urged Cuban officials to agree to the idea.

If its reporting is correct, Mexico's La Jornada stated that Richardson offered a "plan of reciprocal actions to normalize relations with Cuban authorities."

Let's call this "The Richardson Plan."

From the Cuban Triangle report on what we are now calling "The Richardson Plan":

The plan would defer larger and more contentious issues and start with the two sides taking humanitarian steps.

The United States would put into effect the announced Obama policy ending restrictions on family travel and remittances; allow greater sports, cultural, scientific, academic, and business exchanges; and allow Americans in general to travel to the island.

Cuba would end "bureaucratic restrictions and high fees" that make family visits more costly, accept a U.S. proposal to end the restrictions that limit both sides' diplomats to the Havana and Washington capital areas, and start an "informal dialogue" with Cuban Americans.

Regarding his own role:

Richardson also said that he sees no need for a U.S. special envoy and doesn't think he will have a role in U.S. diplomacy toward Cuba.

A couple of quick reactions from TWN's corner.

First of all, Bill Richardson is the right guy to upend the institutional inertia at the Department of State and the House Foreign Affairs Committee in charting a new, more constructive course in US-Cuba relations. He gets this issue better than any other major player in US politics and made this clear as well during the presidential debates and his campaign for the White House.

His modest statement that America did not need a "special envoy" -- and did not need him -- for this challenge is incorrect.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "promised" Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar a "full policy review" during detailed responses to written questions (pdf) posed by Lugar to the then nominee Clinton.

Nothing at all of consequence has happened with this review. There is no broad re-assessment of opportunities and challenges in the US-Cuba relationship, nor a new assessment of what was achieved or not regionally and internationally from Obama's recent Summit of the Americas outreach to Cuba and his efforts to lighten travel and remittance restrictions for Cuban-Americans.

At this point, Secretary of State Clinton has a State Department that is in "non-compliance" with the oversight committee of the US Senate that measures and observes the administration's actions because of the failure to perform this promised "policy review" -- behind which Clinton hid when not responding to a number of important questions.

That is why Bill Richardson is needed.

There are many decades of institutionalized neglect and built in inertia in the US-Cuba relationship that prevent the State Department from not only "seeing what is possible" in a restructured relationship -- but in deploying a strategy that moves us squarely and definitively in a new direction.

Travel for Cuban-Americans is not enough. That is a discriminatory executive order that creates a class of action and opportunities for one class of ethnic Americans and denies equal treatment for other Americans. Obama should know better.

But despite Richardson's own references to Cuban-Americans in his commentary in Cuba, he has frequently endorsed the removal of travel restrictions for all Americans. That is the policy that an American democratic government should embrace.

As Republican Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ-6) said on one occasion at the New America Foundation:

Communist governments are supposed to be the ones that restrict the travel of their citizens -- not the government of the United States of America where people are supposed to be free. But it is our government -- the United States government -- that is imposing restrictions on American citizens. This is wrong.

Barack Obama should take a step back from the US-Cuba question and realize that changing US-Cuba relations much more than he has remains the lowest hanging fruit among foreign policy possibilities for him. US-Cuba relations has always mattered far beyond the relationship itself and had important "echo" impacts on broader world affairs.

It's time that Obama realized that this one is easier than it looks. People to people exchange. Travel. Scientific, cultural and educational exchange. All of these are the pathway to taking the US-Cuba relationship in a new and healthy direction.

Drop the counterproductive, compulsive obsessiveness with "conditionality." It does not work and undermines American interests.

Those who wanted conditionality have achieved nothing the last five decades except freezing the relationship in a Cold War status quo that must be shattered.

And the best way to shatter it is to incrementally pull out the foundations of the "theory of the embargo" and to rebuild some degree of trust between regimes that may not learn to like each other for a long time -- but who nonetheless could demonstrate a practical kind of engagement that few thought possible even a few years ago.

Obama should ask Bill Richardson to be his envoy, sherpa and nudge to drive US-Cuba relations beyond the anachronistic Cold War trap they have been in towards new terms of engagement fit for the 21st century and Obama's eventual foreign policy legacy.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Extra reading: For those interested, my colleague Patrick Doherty's work on a set of humanitarian protocols tied to hurricane diplomacy with former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson is gaining some real traction.

The Democratic Party of Japan has scored a historic and monumental victory over the many decades ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Japan.

The DPJ has scored 308 seats in Japan's powerful lower house while the LDP has retained only 119 seats. With various anti-conservative party allies, the DPJ should be able to control about 340 seats in the Lower House -- 20 more than are needed to prevent the LDP from causing legislative mischief and roadblocks.

Japan now has a genuine two party structure -- and the Japanese government that will soon take form succeeding the Taro Aso government -- will be the first manifestation in many years that a post-WWII lobotomized Japan has now healed itself and is moving forward.

Japan will now learn to be itself, to pursue its own interests in a more healthy manner than in the past. The United States will remain Japan's key ally -- but less key than before. Japan will support America globally but not in all matters.

Japan will now become something new -- and its democracy today is far more real than what it has had in decades.

More soon on the elections, but Tobias Harris is one of the best to check in on.

-- Steve Clemons

If you can spare ten minutes, this interview with former Australia Prime Minister Paul Keating offers some of the smartest commentary on the consequences of the global financial crisis. It is from February 2009 but it's still relevant today.

George Soros calls what Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and others built economically "a super bubble." Keating calls it a "Super Boom" and says it has blown out.

He said that there will be an entire restructuring of global power ahead.

Thoughtful, sobering commentary that I wanted to bring to your attention.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo of Paul Wolfowitz and Steve Clemons at Australian Prime Minister's Official Residence in Sydney -- Kirribilli House, 16 August 2009. When taken, Paul Wolfowitz remarked, "I don't know whose reputation will take more of a hit for this picture -- yours or mine. . ."

Paul Wolfowitz penned a provocative critique of foreign policy realism in this week's Foreign Policy magazine.

Four responses to Wolfowitz were posted online last night in a series called "Is Paul Wolfowitz for Real?"

Stephen Walt, "Just Because He Walks Like a Realist. . ."

David J. Rothkopf, "A Neocon in Realist's Clothing"

Daniel W. Drezner, "Capitalization Matters"

Steve Clemons, "Failing to Note the Difference When the U.S. Power Tank Is Full or Near Empty"

Look forward to hearing thoughts of others on this discussion.

I will be at Waldens Coffeehouse in Reno, Nevada this morning.

-- Steve Clemons

Patrick Doherty directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

Governor Bill Richardson is visiting Cuba on a trade mission for his state this week. In an AP story filed yesterday, Richardson announced that he would report on his trip to President Barack Obama, but that he was not on a mission and carried no message from Washington.

When Richardson reports, Obama should recruit. President Obama should offer this former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, former Secretary of Energy, and former member of Congress a role as the point person for the Obama administration's Cuba policy. It is a perfect opportunity at a perfect time.

First, he's got the chops. "Rogue-state" Richardson built his diplomatic reputation on negotiating with authoritarian regimes to secure U.S. interests. He successfully negotiated with Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Kim Jong-Il, and Omar al-Bashir. All of those countries exported nuclear weapons, invaded their neighbors and/or committed crimes against humanity. By contrast, the Castro government, now exporting doctors and nurses, nickel, tobacco, rum and tanned tourists, is tame.

He's also got 'street cred' in DC. Mr. Richardson was the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Deputy Majority Whip. He is also a border-state governor, an agricultural state governor, and the only Hispanic state governor. All of these credentials are essential to being able to make the case within the administration, within Congress, and with the American people that the time to evolve our relations with Cuba is now.

The Governor is no liberal idealist, but has deep realist roots. He began his career in Washington working as a Congressional liaison for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Nixon Administration. After leaving office as Secretary of Energy and before becoming Governor, he joined his old boss at Kissinger McLarty Associates. He sat on the boards of Valero Energy and Diamond Offshore Drilling, giving him a keen understanding of the energy dynamics at play in today's U.S.-Cuba relationship. With that experience, he'll keep a keen eye on the broader U.S. interests at play in Cuba policy rather than those of a small minority of irreconcilable Cuban-Americans.

The Richardson choice would finesse significant bureaucratic deadlock. By picking Richardson and giving him autonomy over his team, President Obama would avoid the web of entanglements built into the State Department bureaucracy. Though career officials, the Cuba desk at State is watched like a hawk by Congressional Cuba Hawks opposed to any efforts to change the 50-year old policy. President Obama does not even have an assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs yet, as his nomination has yet to be voted on by the Senate. It is even doubtful that Secretary of State Clinton, who needs to remain close to Senator Menendez to keep her department's funding intact, has any real interest in putting Cuba on her geopolitical to-do list. It's high time that a president took a page out of Nixon's playbook and did an end run around Foggy Bottom to finally get the Cuba relationship where it should be.

As Envoy, Richardson would be immediately backed by a broad array of domestic support. In Congress, without much effort or fanfare, 160 members in the House and 31 members in the Senate are already cosponsoring legislation to end the travel ban. Former Southern Command CINCs like General Barry McCaffrey and a broad array of groups including the Catholic Church, the American Farm Bureau, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, have come out in favor of changing the policy. Even a majority of Cuban Americans polled in Florida are also ready for a change. And for good reason: the policy failed, contact with everyday Americans and normal trade relations is more effective, and at least the ag sector really stands to benefit, with an estimated $1.2 billion in annual farm sales to Cuba coming from normalization. The world would back him too: last year it voted 185-3 to condemn the U.S. embargo.

The governor could even work part time. Obama's envoy to the Six Party Talks with North Korea, Ambassador Bosworth, has kept his day job as dean of the Fletcher School (Richardson's and this author's alma mater). It might not even take that long. Raul Castro has indicated his willingness to talk, migration talks have already been productive and the Cuban government is signalling to everyone that political prisoners, Obama's key precondition, are doable.

And the timing could not be better. President Obama's honeymoon has been ended by the health care debate and climate change legislation is looking equally difficult. While his reversal of the worst excesses of the Bush administration were a relief, he has yet to deliver the kind of change that the rest of the world expected from candidate Obama. In Latin America, where immigration, energy, and trade issues have great impact on the lives of every day Americans, the neighbors are unanimous: end the embargo and then we'll turn the page. Obama needs a win and Cuba can give it to him.

Richardson's visit along with his clean bill of legal health, is a gift. The White House should accept it and make Bill Richardson him the presidential envoy to Cuba.

-- Patrick Doherty

(Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner waiting for Steve to get home for the surprise birthday party)

Good morning all. Today, we are 47. Well, I am actually. Today is not only my birthday but it also marks the 150th anniversary of the first commercial oil well in the world -- in Titusville, Pennsylvania on August 27th, 1859. Global oil and energy guru Daniel Yergin shared that cocktail chatter about today's date a few weeks ago with me.

We also share this birthday with New School President and former US Senator Bob Kerrey, with whom we have organized a few collaborative events in the past; Pee Wee Herman, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, my junior high school pal and Spencer T. Videon Funeral Home Boys Choir lead soprano Nick Scogna (Nick and I both went to the same middle school -- Beverly Hills Middle School in Upper Darby, PA -- that Tina Fey attended), an old college running friend and engineering genius Brian Strom, and a couple of my office colleagues -- Benjamin Katcher who regularly posts on TWN and Jonathan Wallace who is the right hand apparatchik of Steve Coll at the New America Foundation. For years, I thought Mother Teresa also shared a birthday with me -- but actually, she was technically born yesterday but as she was baptized on August 27th, she used to insist that her birthday was really today.

Speaking of Tina Fey. . .Thanks to Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, I caught this bit on Sarah Palin either flaking out on speaking at events at which she agreed to speak -- or to give her the benefit of the doubt, organizations that had wrongly reported that they had secured Palin as a speaker. If it is the former, then progressive non-profit organizations that have an IRS responsibility to demonstrate non-partisanship could check off that box by inviting her -- and then counting on her not to show up. Just a thought. . .

From the Anchorage Daily News:

Organizers of an Anchorage event that has been billing Sarah Palin for weeks as a star speaker were left scrambling Wednesday after learning that the former governor won't be there for tonight's event and claims to have never been asked.

It would be at least the fourth time in recent months that an anticipated Palin speech has fallen through after Palin and her camp disputed they had ever confirmed it. That includes the brouhaha over whether she'd speak at the annual congressional Republican fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., this summer.

This time it's an event promoting an Alaska ballot measure aimed at making it illegal for teens to get an abortion without telling their parents. The Alaska Family Council has been advertising that Palin would give a speech and become the first official signer of the ballot petition tonight at ChangePoint, the Anchorage megachurch.

This kind of thing is not going to help her $$ receipts from speaking fees that she hopes to rake in over the next few years. Count me happy about this.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

I just received word at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris that Senator Ted Kennedy has died at age 77.

While his passing was increasingly expected, it doesn't make the time and day of his death any less significant and sad.

As John McCain said, Ted Kennedy was probably the United States Senate's last lion -- a powerhouse politician and sculptor of vital national policy designed to help those that our increasingly winner takes all system leaves behind.

I've had the privilege of a long line of encounters with the late Senator, his long time core staff, and several members of his family. I used to see Senator Kennedy in the back halls and corridors of the Senate -- sometimes looking "flat", "lost", sometimes even confused or checked out -- only to see him moments later on the floor of the Senate turn an internal switch on and give some of the most compelling, detail-rich, sweeping calls to legislative action that I have ever heard from that chamber.

I have really enjoyed in recent years, particularly during the Obama campaign, watching Kennedy's fire burn more consistently and brightly.

When I worked in the United States Senate for now Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), I made it a practice to study the structural characteristics of a Senator's office and watched how a variety of Senators managed (or not) to move past the passive act of legislative assent or disagreement by showing executive capabilities at deploying their financial, staff, and political resources to achieve and enact major policy.

Senator Kennedy's political franchise had no rival in the legislative branch of government, and the younger brother of the three Kennedy political trio may very well have been the very best "Executive Legislator" this country has ever seen.

Kennedy's political franchise is enormous. While I watched many US Senators see staff come and go -- mostly indifferent to the young people who gave so much to help their Senators or Congressmen in their important work -- Kennedy and his top generals acquired and nurtured policy and political talent and then made sure that those people stayed connected to "the family."

I will never forget the Kennedy family, staff and friends "holiday parties" in the Senate -- -- in which Ted Kennedy and his wife Vicki would come out dressed in surprise costumes. One of the most memorable was the year that Ted and Vicki came out as "Beauty and the Beast" singing specially crafted songs that were usually self-spoofing.

Barack Obama is a mesmerizing, inspirational leader -- but he is also a highly capable mergers & acquisition synthesizer of political franchises. Obama started with elements of the Daley franchise in Chicago and then morphed in Tom Daschle's political machine. He built in John Edwards' crowd -- and then was able to build in the Kennedy franchise with Ted Kennedy's all important blessing. The Clinton franchise is under the tent -- but still has its own distinct character -- but that is a story for another day.

Barack Obama would not have made it to the Presidency without Ted Kennedy.

When the American Prospect was redesigned, editor Robert Kuttner and then DC editor (and now Talking Points Memo uber-blogger) Joshua Micah Marshall invited me to Ted Kennedy's Kalorama home for a great launch party. I ended up having a fascinating night with Kennedy who regaled a small group of us with some of his more memorable political war stories. He gave me a tour of his house as we got into a discussion about some of the old prints on his wall -- other versions of which I owned after finding them stuffed behind an old cabinet in a very dusty Irish antique store.

I owe the Kennedy clan a lot for my relative success in Washington -- and also want to send my condolences not only to his family members but to his long time staff members and spear carriers -- particularly Gerry Kavanaugh and Nick Littlefield.

Kennedy would want his passing used in the very best of political senses by Obama to pass sweeping health care policy. In fact, Kennedy would insist on it.

My dog, Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner, used to run and play with two of Kennedy's portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash. Kennedy would use a tennis racket to whack out tennis balls to his hyperactive dogs....and my dog would chase them as a puppy. Ted Kennedy was always "on" when he was with them -- and was a delight to chat with in that park.

I will seriously miss Senator Kennedy's presence in Washington and in national politics. He had foes and friends alike -- some who despised all he stood for -- but all saw his political machine as one of the most formidable and effective forces for the common man in American history.

Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.

-- Steve Clemons

Many writers and thinkers have had late nights and early mornings in the past few days, owing to the release yesterday of the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report. In particular, The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman has given the report careful coverage on his blog and in the paper itself, while Andrew Sullivan's blog has been a great source for aggregated insight from different bloggers and journalists. The Washington Post and the New York Times both also have important articles on the report.

Much of the coverage thus-far has focused on the more lurid aspects of the report--abuses, specific techniques used, and the deaths of detainees in American custody. I do not wish to wade into the debate over what may or may not constitute torture, or what level of brutality can be designated illegal. Instead, I would simply like to point readers to the list of "acceptable" interrogation techniques, and encourage them to make up their own mind.

Moreover, while it may be surprising that one high-value detainee (almost certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) was kept without sleep for 180 hours, the report holds few revelations about techniques or tactics used to obtain information.

Rather, other elements of the report concerned me as I read in between the redactions. In particular, the report sketches the picture of an environment where unclear or non-existent guidelines and enforcement of regulations allowed abuses to occur, as portrayed in Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

While it is unsurprising that large sections of the report are blacked-out, it is worth pointing out which sections of the report do not appear. For instance, the report's author(s) state that the Directorate of Operations (DO) handbook explains the CIA's "general interrogation policy." Yet this policy is redacted, in full.

The report's authors also take care to point out several times that, while CIA interrogation procedures and facilities are not required to conform to American prison standards, the CIA was required to provide basic medical care and keep detainees in generally good health. Unfortunately, the released report does not allow us to evaluate the actual medical guidelines used by CIA-employed doctors and interrogators. Similarly, guidelines for the capture of detainees and the specific training given to interrogators are blacked out in the text. And the entire recommendations section is gone.

These are only a few examples, but the redaction of whole sections like these prevents us from evaluating what baseline guidance was given to CIA operatives in the field, and makes it impossible to draw definitive conclusions on how policy-makers defined acceptable tactics and conditions for interrogation. And as Time's Michael Sherer points out, the report admits that at least initially, the guidance and staffing for interrogation programs was severely lacking.

More importantly, key decisions regarding the treatment of prisoners were made on the basis of vague guidelines that left room for major interpretation on the part of agents on the ground. For instance, several times the report's authors note that by law torture was defined as the inflicting of "severe" pain and suffering upon a detainee. But I saw no adequate definition in the report of what constitutes severe mental or physical anguish, ignoring the fact that each person has a different threshold for suffering that must be evaluated by observers and officials.

Furthermore, as Scherer and others have noted, this subjective judgement, as well as a simple lack of information, directly led to the employment of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," or EITs, against high-value detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri.

The report's authors write, for instance, that al Nashiri gave information on other terrorists during the first day of interrogations, but was still waterboarded on the twelfth day, presumably because interrogators felt he was withholding information. Later, after interrogators deemed al Nashiri compliant in December 2002, a seperate operative believed him to be withholding information and subjected him to "hooding and handcuffing." Similarly, even after the team that had been interrogating Abu Zubaydah deemed him compliant, an unidentified operative believed that Zubaydah was holding back, and "generated substantial pressure from Headquarters to continue use of the EITs." After the application of the EIT, the DO determined that Zubaydah had nothing more to offer.

But how did various operatives come to these conclusions about the extent of information held by captured terrorists? From the report's conclusion:

Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs without justification. Some participants in the Program, particularly field interrogators, judge that...assessments to the effect that detainees are withholding information are not always supported by an objective evaluation of available information and the evaluation of the interrogators but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know.

Thus, in important interrogations, decisions about harsh practices were made at times based not on those actually interrogating suspects, but on unsupported feelings and suspicions.

I do not wish, in analyzing this report, to shortchange the immense pressure placed on interrogators and the officials above them to produce intelligence against terrorist leaders and networks. Nor would I downplay the strain induced by the post-9/11 fear of another attack, and the subsequent drive to protect against it.

But the report is vague about whether or not harsh techniques actually produced actionable intelligence (as opposed to normal techniques), and it seems clear that the push to gain information overwhelmed the need to ensure accuracy and compliance with the laws governing the way American agents operate abroad.

It may be painful to read documents such as this, but it is necessary. On the one hand, we must be able to evaluate the most effective ways to glean intelligence, and understand what techniques cause more harm then good, whether in the form of false intelligence or damage to America's image abroad. But more importantly, we must know why there was so little guidance of CIA interrogation operations, at least until 2003, and how much senior leadership knew about interrogations where men, no matter their crime, were made to suffer greatly for what at times seems more like caprice than reason.

-- Andrew Lebovich

My colleague Daniel Levy and I have spent the last couple of days in the Village of Pomerol in the Aquitaine region of France discussing next steps in our Middle East policy work. September and October are going to be big roll out months for all of those engaged in the Israel-Palestine/broader Middle East quagmire.

We expect that somewhere about the 3rd week of September through the beginning of October, President Obama will put stakes in the ground on what he is going to do to take a two states negotiations process forward.

In other news, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is soon off to Cuba. Years ago, a friend of mine ran into Richardson walking along the beach enjoying a cigar -- but we suspect that he is up to some real good down there this time and is kicking the tires on a next round of confidence building steps that the Raul Castro government might initiate in soft, untied exchange for U.S. gestures.

Suspending Radio Marti might be a great start. It's interesting to note that while Barack Obama was in the US Senate, he voted against funding Radio Marti -- according to him not because he opposed the idea of broadcasting but rather because he felt Radio Marti did not work.

Laura Rozen, who has done superlative work in making The Cable one of the hottest foreign policy reads on line, is leaving Foreign Policy magazine's fold and joining Politico. Congratulations to Laura and Politico -- though Ben Smith had a friendly salute somewhat warning her that he'd still be trying to scoop her -- while linking to her too.

TWN is departing France tomorrow and is back to Washington -- if my car works in the morning. The gentleman standing next to the cute little Mercedes on-the-road fix-it car was a mechanic dispatched yesterday to get my Hertz car to start as the battery had gone completely dead. I can't figure out anything I might have done to drain the battery -- but seeing the car they dispatched made it all worth it.

For those of you in Asia, I will be chairing a panel and actively participating in the World Ecnomic Forum's "Summer Davos" forum taking place 10-12 September in Dalian, China. The focus of the overall meeting is on relaunching global growth and should be interesting -- and depressing for those of us who would like something in the US like the high speed train link up that makes it possible for people to travel from Beijing to Tianjin in 30 minutes.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

There will be much more on this in the days to come, but here is the heavily-redacted 2004 CIA Inspector General's report on interrogation practices, scanned and posted by The Washington Independent and with commentary from Spencer Ackerman. This report is, of course, different from the Obama administration Task Force on Interrogation and Rendition report, also slated for release today.

It has been impossible to open a newspaper over the last few days without reading coverage of the IG report's findings, allegations of torture, and the potential for Justice Department inquiries into the mistreatment and even deaths of detainees in American custody (the Washington Post has a useful collection of stories on the varies CIA interrogation debates, which can be found here). CIA director Leon Panetta also wrote a letter to the agency in anticipation of the 2004 report's release, urging the agency, and by extension the American public, to move on from the history of past abuses.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration seems to be of different minds on the question of what to do about detainee rights. On the one hand the White House announced the creation of new interagency team that will be responsible for interrogating top terrorism suspects according to the regulations of the Army field manual, while at the same time President Obama said he will continue the process of rendition for terrorists, though supposedly not to nations that torture.

We will be doing analysis of the report (as well as analysis of other analysis) as more news and the Task Force report trickle in.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is one of Europe's premier political operators. Scandals and intrigue seem to add to his mystique, at least when it comes to French politics.

A poll was released today in France indicating that among Democratic Socialists, Strauss-Kahn is favored by 33% of those questioned. Segolene Royal pulled 14%. Bertrand Delanoe 13%. Current party leader Martine Aubry drew just 9%.

Strauss-Kahn now runs the International Monetary Fund for which G-20 nations are scrambling to expand resources. So whereas Strauss-Kahn, recently pilloried for a sex scandal involving a former staff member, came to a position that many people thought would be a dead end with the perceived decline of IMF relevance in a world glut (then) of capital.

Since the global financial crisis, the IMF is back big time -- and Strauss-Kahn is surfing the waves of renewed Bretton Woods importance.

But he may just decide to leave DC while he's ahead and go back to France to challenge Sarkozy in the next presidential elections.

If he does, he should check out the small village of Pomerol near the Medieval town of St. Emilion where I am working for a few days. I am staying at the Chateau Pomeaux and highly recommend the wine from here (great years: 1998, 2000, 2005).

-- Steve Clemons

The authors were members of the HELP Commission which in December 2007 made recommendations to Congress for the reform of U.S. Foreign Assistance. Leo Hindery, Jr. is chairman of the Smart Globalization Initiative at New America Foundation and a media industry executive; C. Payne Lucas is the co-founder of Africare, and Jerry Climer is president of the Public Governance Institute.

As Secretary of State Clinton wound down her tour of Eastern African nations with a visit to Liberia, she saw firsthand an important case study for her newly announced "Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review" (QDDR), which will in the future periodically examine all of the recipients of U.S. foreign assistance and make detailed assessments of their all-of-country long-term humanitarian and development needs.

When Liberia, a Tennessee-sized country of 3.2 million people, emerged in 2005 from 14 years of devastating internal warfare, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf assumed leadership of a country with no electricity, few intact buildings and almost no roads, no prior schooling for an entire generation, no trained police force, and less than $100 million a year in government revenues.

Now just four years later, as the beneficiary of significant foreign assistance since 2005, Liberia is one of the African countries friendliest toward the United States and the developed world and certainly the one most willing to proclaim those friendships. Numerous donors are now committed to helping Liberia, including the U.S. which is currently Liberia's single largest government donor.

But even though there is economic progress visible almost everywhere in the country, Liberia is still one of the poorest African nations with an average life expectancy of just 44 years. And Secretary Clinton saw, also firsthand, that there is still not enough money in the long-term foreign assistance pipeline to complete the country's restoration. Nor is there a sufficiently large foreign commitment to equally important non-monetary assistance, especially for leadership training and good governance initiatives.

Until there are significantly more capital assets in place and expanded partnerships with foreign donors, NGOs and overseas companies and agencies, Liberia will not have large-scale sustained development. And this is precisely the purpose and value of the QDDR, for as the prominent development economist Paul Collier discovered, it is often better not to provide any assistance to developing countries with recent violent pasts, than to provide an insufficient amount.

The QDDR was put in place both to fill the knowledge gap of how much assistance is enough and to help refute those naysayers, in Congress and elsewhere, who continue to deny the imperative of foreign assistance. But down the road, QDDR's most important result may be helping Liberia and other stressed countries rid themselves, once and for all, of the overhanging "conflict traps" that Collier also identified.

A conflict trap is the dangerous reality that just "the experience of having been through a civil war roughly doubles the risk of another conflict" and that continued "low income and slow growth make a country [especially] prone" to such recurrence.

The solution to Liberia's particular conflict trap will be found mostly in creating productive jobs and in gaining stability and safety through large-scale police training and civil institution building. These are no small tasks, but each represents areas in which foreign donors are especially adept.

As Senate-appointed members of the 2005-2007 U.S. Commission to "Help Enhance the Livelihood of People" (the HELP Commission) and from other experiences, we have had many opportunities to assess conditions on the ground in Africa and we know that addressing needs of the scale still confronting Liberia is a monumental challenge.
Consider just electricity.

Right now, the only power in the entire country comes from a few personally-owned generators and a tiny 10-megawatt public utility in the capital city of Monrovia that together produce only about 20% of the country's needs. The only potential large-scale source of electricity, which is a dam on the St. Paul River, could, with the help of the donor community, be repaired in a few years time. And yet when finished there would still be none of the transmission lines, billing systems or payment mechanisms needed for even the most modest national grid and distribution system.

This challenge is just one example of what the QDDR process is all about, and why the HELP Commission in its final report recommended implementation of just such an initiative.

Development and diplomacy are critical steps toward a safer world, and when Liberia's QDDR is complete, it will be obvious to everyone that this country - which is so important in Africa and so entwined with our nation's early history and own civil war - must never be allowed to slip back into lawlessness. Importantly, the specific amounts, manner and time frames of the foreign aid that's needed into the future will be just as apparent.

-- Leo Hindery, C. Payne Lucas, and Jerry Climer

Pope Benedict XVI and President Obama meet at the Vatican (White House Photo)

Patrick Doherty directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

In a well-publicized visit to the island of Cuba, a delegation from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops this week called on Havana and Washington to "listen to our better angels" and work to end the embargo that has caused decades of unnecessary suffering on the people of both nations.

That's good advice. One can presume that this was the same message spoken directly to President Obama by Pope Benedict XVI in their discussions of Cuba, conversations revealed by Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough to the Miami Herald last month.

Such a conversation would be consistent. Though relations between the originally-atheist Castro government and the Vatican were rocky, the Vatican never withdrew its diplomatic recognition of or representation in Cuba. But the end of the Cold War presented Havana with an opportunity to improve relations, leading to a visit by Fidel Castro to the Apostolic Palace in 1996 and the Pope's visit to Cuba in 1998.

In his farewell address in Cuba, Pope John Paul II said the following:

May nations, and especially those which share the same Christian heritage and the same language, work effectively to extend the benefits of unity and harmony, to join efforts and overcome obstacles so that the Cuban people, as the active agents of their own history, may maintain international relations which promote the common good. In this way they will be helped to overcome the suffering caused by material and moral poverty, the roots of which may be found, among other things, in unjust inequalities, in limitations to fundamental freedoms, in depersonalization and the discouragement of individuals, and in oppressive economic measures - unjust and ethically unacceptable - imposed from outside the country.

-- Patrick Doherty

Jonathan Guyer is a Program Associate with the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

During President Obama's brief presser with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday, one word was conspicuously absent: comprehensive.

While much of the two leaders' remarks focused on the Israel-Palestine track, they only alluded to the Arab Peace Initiative (API), which holds out the opportunity of normalized relations with the Arab states as an incentive for Israel to end the occupation and solidify a two-state solution.

Thus far, President Obama has tried to break down this everything-for-everything scenario by turning the comprehensive aspect of the API into a sequential process. In letters President Obama reportedly sent to a handful of Gulf and Arab states, he urged them to take the lead in confidence-building measures toward Israel. Special Envoy Mitchell has also pursued this short-term goal.

Compare this to Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal's view. While visiting Washington last month, FM al-Faisal maintained a strong line on the need for a comprehensive two-state solution while also asserting that a bits and pieces approach will not bring the parties closer to a deal:

Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and - we believe - will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence- building measures will also not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues: borders, Jerusalem, water, refugees and security.

The United States Senate has taken a decidedly different approach. At the end of their legislative session, 77 senators signed onto the Bayh-Risch Letter which put the onus on Arab states to "do more to end their isolation of Israel."

However, if Arab states were to upgrade relations with Israel based on minor policy changes coming out of Tel Aviv - such as the temporary construction freeze in the West Bank which Ha'aretz reported yesterday - what incentive would that leave for Israelis to clinch a comprehensive deal?

Early normalization gestures are just that - too early and merely gestures. True progress will be cultivated at the very moment of establishing a Palestinian state, and a tit for tat strategy will only sidetrack this big picture goal.

Shai Feldman and Gilead Sher echo this point in their op-ed, "The grand bargain that is the Mideast's best hope," published in today's Financial Times:

The reluctance of Saudi Arabia's Prince al-Faisal to reward a partial Israeli move such as a settlement construction freeze is understandable given the distrust between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The failure to end the conflict through interim stages has made all parties skeptical about such steps being more than temporary.

Instead, what is proposed here is that the Arab states engage Israel in an exercise in reverse engineering. The Arab states should announce that once Israel reaches an agreement with the Palestinians on a permanent resolution of the dispute, the Arab states would reward Israel for every step it takes towards implementing this vision.

To resolve the conflict, gestures have not and will not be enough. It's not the incremental steps in and of themselves that are negative, but rather the fact that those baby steps will in turn be viewed as the objective.

Let's go comprehensive.

-- Jonathan Guyer

Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon sent this note out on Twitter earlier today:

Hopes the rumored settlement freeze is just a rumor, because it hasn't gone through appropriate forums.

This is the best news I've heard in a while. Ayalon's plea may mean that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be using his skills as a crafty political executive to sidestep some of his more bureaucratic and recalcitrant allies in cooking up a deal with George Mitchell and Barack Obama on settlements.

There are -- as Ayalon indicates -- lots of rumors bubbling out of the region that George Mitchell's team will soon announce a plan to launch negotiations toward a two state solution with a number of key confidence building measures tucked into the first phase.

If Ayalon is in the dark -- which he may be faking -- this is pretty good news as it means Netanyahu doesn't want a bunch of different opinionated Israeli chefs in his kitchen.

I had a pretty long interview today with WBEZ Chicago Public Radio's Worldview anchor Jerome McDonnell on the subject of Netanyahu, Obama, the Settlements and George Mitchell's efforts to secure two state negotiations.

I was very satisfied with the interview segment which you can listen to here.

The whole show was divided into five segments -- which I list below -- but the program in its entirety can be listened to here:

Effectiveness of Obama's Israeli Settlement Policy - Part 1

Steve Clemons is Senior Fellow & Director of the American Strategy Program for the New America Foundation, and Author of the blog, The Washington Note.

Effectiveness of Obama's Israeli Settlement Policy - Part 2

Jeremy Ben-Ami is Executive Director of J Street, a pro Israel, Pro-peace lobby group in Washington, DC.

Effectiveness of Obama's Israeli Settlement Policy - Part 3

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and Author of the books Sowing Crisis: American Hegemony and the Cold War in the Middle East AND The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.

Effectiveness of Obama's Israeli Settlement Policy - Part 4

Michael Kotzin is Executive Vice-President of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago

Israeli, Palestinian Teens Seek Common Ground on Chicago's North Shore - Part 5

A Glenview program hopes to eventually help Israelis and Palestinians co-exist by reaching out to teens. WBEZ's Lynette Kalsnes reports.

We still don't know the full outlines of what George Mitchell and his team are hatching -- but so far the early signs are hopeful.

-- Steve Clemons

(Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaking to New America Foundation foreign policy programs director Steve Clemons at Kirribilli House, Sydney, 16 August 2009; photo credit: Larry Irving)

I have just finished a few days of meetings in Melbourne and Sydney under the auspices of the annual Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a significant track 2 dialogue forum for leading Australians and Americans founded 17 years ago by entrepreneur Phil Scanlan -- who was just recently appointed Australia's new Consul General in New York.

There is no annual assembly I know of -- short of perhaps Ditchley in the UK (which is not generally a consistent set of folks) -- that brings together consistently a genuinely bipartisan set of national leaders from both countries.

This year and/or during years past, those participating have included diverse personalities ranging from World Bank President Robert Zoellick to former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice to the spousal power duo of Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs Lael Brainard to Vice President Richard Cheney to Democratic Leadership Council President Bruce Reed, to Republican foreign policy mavens Michael Green, Paula Dobriansky and Richard Armitage -- to the three pals & policy musketeers of Thomas Mann of Brookings, Norman Ornstein of AEI, and EJ Dionne of Brookings and the Washington Post as well as 'yours truly' on the American side. The Australian roster has included founding Dialogue member and now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, leading opposition figures Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop, former Labor Party Leader Kim Beazley, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Midnight Oil lead singer and Environment Minister Peter Garrett, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter Hartcher, and The Australian Editor at Large Paul Kelly among others.

The content of the meetings is strictly off the record. We don't even get away with Chatham House rules unless the speaker gives us permission to use the material we hear.

That said, this Dialogue framed for me why the United States needs Australia so badly -- particularly under the current leadership of Kevin Rudd, who like our new US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman is a fluent speaker of Mandarin.

Rudd and his government realize that China is the biggest "new" show in town in the region and that the rise of China's economic and military weight in global affairs will both reward and punish Australian interests. The United States will continue to be a globally "great power" but on a relative basis compared to China's rise, the US is likely to see some of its influence contested and rolled back.

Australia is an important buffer, point of leverage, and institution builder that can actually preserve a significant degree of Western and American influence in the region -- and buffer against China's worst behaviors and try to encourage China's better side.

Australia is wedged well between the realities of accepting China's emergence and on the other hand knowing that America's brand of geopolitical influence must be a key balancer against China's missteps and over reach.

Sometimes China will beat up on Australia to send messages to America -- or reward it and engage Australia as a proxy for its comfort with the West. Australia will need to pursue its basic national interests with China while still raising concerns about China's adherence to rule of law both domestically and internationally and pushing China to accede to covenants recognizing universal human rights -- which are part of the DNA of institutions like the United Nations.

The US needs independently minded allies that help counsel the behavior and course of major global players. Australia sits in nearly all of the regional multilateral structures in the Asia Pacific - but other key powers such as China, India, and the United States are themselves not parties to each and every one of these. This may be a good thing as the absence of some and presence of others creates a dynamic tension that raises the value of nations like Indonesia, Japan, and Australia in helping to broker stable and mutually constructive arrangements between status quo superpowers like the US and ascendant powers like China and India.

Australia talks quite a bit about trying to create a new multilateral structure that includes the US, China and India -- but hopefully this will remain more talk than real, because the great and ascendant superpowers need the flexibility of not having all other great powers in the room to float proposals and to walk back unconstructive initiatives that may flop in one forum -- but which can be recrafted in another.

Former Prime Minister John Howard's government had a number of strengths -- particularly on the economic front -- but to some degree, Howard's extremely close security cooperation with the United States both in Iraq and Afghanistan may have moved Australia into the position of being a "taken for granted" ally -- rather than one that America worked hard to build a back-and-forth relationship that managed opportunities and problems alike.

America needs an ally like Australia that will be with the U.S. on some occasions and which will oppose it on others. America needs an ally with a foot in the West and a foot in Asia with close economic and political ties to China that nonetheless will speak up when China violates key international norms. The US needs an ally that will push genuinely multilateral efforts on climate change, managing the global economy, and in global institution building as a counterweight to America's tendency to disguise unilateral intentions in a multilateral mask.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd effervesces effective multilateral thinking -- which is a compliment in my book. Rudd is a serious strategist with an impressive progressive vision for his nation and the broader international community. He acknowledges great admiration for and respect for Barack Obama -- but Rudd also won't pull punches when it comes to telling the US and its new President things that America sometimes doesn't want to hear.

Rudd exemplifies what the US needs in its key allies today.

-- Steve Clemons

Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie Gelb has an interesting article over at the Daily Beast that is highly critical of the Obama administration's decision to accept Georgia's offer to send 750 soldiers to Afghanistan.

Gelb makes a persuasive argument that this decision is unlikely to have any appreciable consequences for our war against the Taliban, but will surely anger Moscow and complicate our efforts to get relations on a better track. He says

It's hard to predict how irksome this issue will become in Russian-American relations. It might derail serious conversation for a long stretch. At a minimum, it will delay critical cooperation on Iran. But what's truly troubling about this story is what it reveals, once again, about President Obama's misunderstanding of strategy and priorities, or at the very least, his lack of appreciation for exactly what it takes to accomplish big priorities. To reset relations with Russia requires a host of key decisions, and it's not clear that all or most of them have been made. First of all, Obama has to have a new overall U.S. strategy. What exactly does Obama want from Moscow and what will he give in return? What's the bargaining sequence, or does he want to try for an overall deal? Does he want to wait to push Tehran until he lines up Moscow, or go ahead this fall without the Russians? The whole process will take a lot of high-level meetings. Who will take the lead--the president himself, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? And of course, Obama has to set in motion a palatable explanation for how this approach will affect the security of Georgia and Ukraine.

More broadly, Gelb makes an implicit point about the dangerous consequences that the Afghan war might have for Obama's presidency.

The Afghan war has the potential to distract the Obama administration from the larger strategic issues of the day in a way that is analogous to Bush's war in Iraq. Just as Iraq opened doors for Iran and aggravated fissures with our European allies, the war in Afghanistan has the potential to raise serious questions about the NATO alliance while complicating our relationships with China, Russia, and Europe.

Those wondering why we are in Afghanistan and what our exit strategy is will not be heartened by Gilles Dorronsoro's op-ed in today's Financial Times.

-- Ben Katcher

Over at Stratfor, George Friedman has a very interesting piece on the possibility of closer ties between Russia and Iran.

Friedman lays out in detail the key geopolitical factors that are shaping the Iran-Russia-U.S. triangle.

Essentially, Friedman's tentative conclusion is that Washington's aggressive policies toward both Moscow and Tehran are bringing the two hydrocarbon exporters closer together.

Meanwhile, in a related move, Russia this month secured access to Turkish waters for its proposed South Stream natural gas pipeline. South Stream will allow Russia to export gas to Europe without going through Ukraine, with which it has very frosty relations at the moment.

The deal on South Stream comes on the heels of an agreement among Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria and Hungary on the Nabucco project - a pipeline intended to transport Caspian and possibly Middle Eastern gas to Europe via Turkey while bypassing Russia.

The goal of the Nabucco project is to diversify Europe's natural gas supplies away from Russia. Europe is currently dependent on Russia for 25% of its natural gas imports.

Remarkably, United States Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar is denying that South Stream and Nabucco are competitors.

Furthermore, Morningstar says that the Nabucco project - which remember was meant to be an alternative to Russian gas - should be open to Russian gas, but not to Iranian gas.

It will be interesting to watch how long Europe and Turkey are willing to follow U.S. orders and refuse to allow Iranian gas to help fill the Nabucco pipeline. Turkey already imports gas from Iran and says that Iranian gas should be allowed to help fill the pipeline.

Meanwhile, Reinhard Mitschek the managing director of Nabucco Gas Pipeline International is leaving the door open to Iranian participation. He says that It will be up to European customers to decide for themselves whether to import Iranian gas.

For all of Washington's talk about diversifying Europe's gas supply away from Russia, it appears that the one move that could actually make a difference - allowing Europe to import Iranian gas - remains off the table.

This situation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later, Iran will increase its gas exports and Europe will not be in a position to turn them away.

-- Ben Katcher

Anya Landau French is the research director for the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative.

President George W. Bush pursued what has been described as the most aggressive U.S. trade policy ever. No country was too large or small to negotiate new and better market access for U.S. exports. Except, of course, Cuba.

The Bush Administration's logic on Cuba was somewhat (okay, more like extremely) twisted: Mr. Bush worked to stamp out what little trade there was with Cuba, like U.S. food exports legalized in 2000, because trading with Cuba would hand the Castro regime hard currency (though how making Castro pay cash for American food lined his pockets with cash is more than a little fuzzy math).

On Cuba, President Bush regularly sent out officials - such as former HUD Secretary Mel Martinez and former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez (both Cuban Americans) - to repeat that message. But it turns out though, that Mr. Bush's top agriculture trade negotiator, Ambassador Allen Johnson, didn't agree, and he's speaking out in the Sunday Des Moines Register.

While I am proud of negotiating numerous access agreements to get U.S. agricultural commodities and food products into once-closed markets, we also continued the same policies regarding Cuba that have been around for more than a generation. The policy of creating hungrier and poorer Cubans in hopes of bringing down their government has been tragically ineffective . . .

. . . Reasonable people can disagree on how to achieve the objective of seeing Cuba free. These include some of my closest friends and they understandably have strong emotions around this issue. The Castro regime will not last forever and the bonds we build today, by helping to feed and engage the Cuban people, will long endure after they are gone. As a new generation of Cubans comes of age in the streets and in the leadership, we should not miss the chance to put American food in their stomachs and American freedoms in their hearts and minds. We shouldn't trade this opportunity for anything.

That Ambassador Johnson calls for making agricultural exports to Cuba easier is no surprise. Recall that when President Bush moved to slow down cash in advance sales to Cuba (by redefining the term so as to make the transaction impossible) some of the staunchest supporters of Cuba sanctions jumped off the President's bandwagon: Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, then-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Republican Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, then-Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, banded with farm belt Democrats like Senator Max Baucus of Montana, to oppose President Bush's new rule.

But for Ambassador Johnson to break with his former Commander in Chief to call for lifting the Cuba travel ban (for all Americans, not just Farmer-Americans) demonstrates the impatience in unexpected and powerful corners - like the farmbelt - to dislodge our entire Cuba policy from the unproductive and emotion-based politics in which it has been mired for decades.

-- Anya Landau French

Amjad Atallah co-directs the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

This past Friday, Hamas engaged in an intense battle with a Salafist group called Jund Ansar Allah (the Soldiers of the Supporters of God). The instigation for the battle came after the leader of the group, Abdul Latif Musa, gave a Friday sermon calling for the immediate implementation of an "Islamic emirate" in the Gaza Strip and for a Taliban-like Salafist version of Shariah (or Islamic law) to be imposed.

Hamas didn't wait. Before his sermon was over, al-Jazeera reported that Hamas police surrounded the mosque and demanded the surrender of Musa and his supporters. The ensuing gun battle left at least 28 dead, including six Hamas police and six civilians including an 11-year old girl, and over 100 wounded. Musa died, according to Hamas, when he blew himself up rather than surrender to the police.

For years, analysts without a stake in supporting either Fatah or Hamas, or Likud or Kadima, including leading former American statesmen, have argued that the Bush-era policy of blockading the Gaza Strip, starving the population, and supporting Israeli attacks on the Strip instead of maintaining a cease-fire, was morally incoherent, illegal under international law, and tactically counter-productive. Even as Somalia became a case study for what one shouldn't do, the Bush team couldn't help but hope that what failed in one place might succeed in another.

Just as a reminder, an Islamist group called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) took over Mogadishu and much of Somalia after years of international inaction and began establishing law and order. Checkpoints were shut down, the airport and seaport were opened, and Somalis in the Diaspora began returning to see how they could help rebuild their failed state.

Rather than engage the ICU and attempt to moderate any potential Salafist tendencies, the US "encouraged" Ethiopia to invade Somalia, fatally weakening the ICU, and simultaneously opening the door to outright chaos and the rise of a Salafist group called the Shabab, leaving western countries to scramble to find ICU leaders with whom they can still work. Piracy off the Horn became a common phenomenon.

Hamas has been more successful than the ICU because Israel has been less successful than Ethiopia. The repeated attempts to overthrow Hamas, which took over the Palestinian Authority in the 2006 elections in the Occupied Territory, have weakened but not bowed Hamas. However, the alternative in Gaza has not been the secular Fatah, but Salafist groups.

The vigor with which Hamas is responding to this challenge (perhaps too vigorous), ironically, would be difficult, if not impossible, by the US-trained Palestinian forces under General Dayton's instruction in the West Bank. This is not because of any lack of ability, but because of a limit on legitimacy imposed by its cooperation with Israel within the context of the on-going Israeli occupation.

Hamas police are viewed as bringing law and order AND resisting Israel. The West Bank police can only do the former and actually must stand by impotently when Israel conducts raids in the West Bank including in Ramallah, a source of constant complaint to the US government by our Palestinian friends in Ramallah.

This points to a much larger point for US-Middle East strategy. The best forces to counter Salafist ideology, including misogyny, bigotry, and support for violence against civilians, comes not from US military pressure, but from potential alliances with more moderate nationalist Islamist groups which have legitimacy within their own communities. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's attack on Musa, the leader of the Salafist group, has more resonance on Muslims in the Gaza Strip than an Israeli attack on the mosque, which would have undoubtedly strengthened support for the group.

Fatah, in this sense, is a unique exception, as it remains the only popular based secular nationalist movement left in the Arab world. However, as long as its policy of negotiating with Israel and administering small parts of the occupied territory does not translate into freedom and independence for Palestinians, it will continue to be hamstrung by its tether to the occupation forces. Anyone who thinks that Fatah will get credit for small economic improvements in Palestinian eyes while the occupation continues should google news stories from the 1990s.

This incident shows more than ever the danger to the Obama administration's goals of a comprehensive regional peace if it continues any of the Bush-era policies in the region, whether in attempting to manage the Israeli occupation with incremental improvements, continuing a blockade on the Gaza Strip, or expecting war to result in peace agreements. It is clear that President Obama disagrees in principle with these approaches, but the policies on the ground have yet to catch up.

As we all so heartily chanted during the US presidential elections, "It's time for a change." Hamas actions on Friday should prompt an internal review of US policy toward Palestinian unity. There should be a prompt reconsideration of whether the international community cannot follow the lead of peace groups and open the Gaza Strip from the sea, in cooperation with a technocratic unity Palestinian government, to relieve the assault on the civilian population that has bred Salafist extremism. This would de-couple US policy in the region from Likud's intransigence far more than our months long negotiation with Netanyahu on a settlement freeze.

Simultaneously, there should be a broader reconsideration of how and when the US can find common cause with nationalist Islamist groups willing to condemn violence against civilians to promote long term US goals for the region.

-- Amjad Atallah

Last night at the gala 800 person dinner of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, I was able to connect with the impressive Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and chatted with him about his and Barack Obama's side chatter about Hawaii.

At an AALD reception in Washington a year or so ago, Rudd was then recounting to some of us that "The Dialogue" of which he was a founding member was the first activity that brought him to the United States. His wife, Therese Rein, hauled off and hit the newly minted Prime Minister in the arm and said, "Have you forgotten our honeymoon in Hawaii?!"

Given Barack Obama's affinity and family roots in Hawaii, I thought this anecdote about Rudd would be fun for America's new President and made sure that President Obama was informed about Rudd's humorous stumble.

And last night, Rudd chuckled to me that not only did he hear about this incident of lapsed memory about Hawaii and its inclusion in the USA from Obama but also a lot of other folks as well.

Today, the American delegation of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue will be treated to a barbecue at the Prime Minister's official residence, Kirribilli House, in Sydney.

Then tonight, speaking of Hawaii -- I am off to Honolulu -- and then tomorrow Tokyo.

On other fronts, Barack Obama is not underscoring that Hawaii is his most favorite vacation retreat in the world by choosing to take his family during the last week of August to a 28 acre estate on Martha's Vineyard.

Martha's Vineyard? That was where Bill Clinton put his presidential vacation stamp.

Note to President Obama: If someone asks you -- whether through an interpreter or not -- anything about President Bill Clinton and if you chatted with the former President about his favorite Vineyard nooks, please do not get huffy and say:

"You are asking me about Bill Clinton? YOU.....are asking me to channel Bill Clinton?? Bill Clinton is not the President now. I am the President. . ."

All in fun. . .

-- Steve Clemons

President Obama came into office promising to change the United States' policy toward Iran - but it was never clear exactly what that change would be.

On the one hand he denounced the thirty year failure of our policy toward Iran, suggesting that our policy of isolation and indefinite antagonism was counterproductive and needed to be revisited.

But on the other hand he called for "bigger carrots and bigger sticks," which sounded more like a tactical adjustment than a fundamental strategic shift.

The chief question from a strategic point of view is, how can we shape Iran's interests so that the Islamic Republic behaves in a way compatible with our interests? The Bush administration's policy of isolation, threats, and sanctions was obviously ineffective.

Unfortunately, it appears more and more likely that the Obama administration is going down the same road. Offering to negotiate for a year while considering imposing extreme sanctions - including cutting off American and European gasoline imports - can hardly be considered a strategic shift.

As Flynt Leverett has written, the Obama administration's policy has been one of "engagement with pressure," offering to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the regime.

According to David Sanger, administration officials believe that crippling sanctions might "force Iran to negotiate." And in today's Wall Street Journal, Michael Jacobson and Mark Dubowitz claim that "Smart Sanctions Can Work Against Iran" - but nowhere in their article do they explain exactly how imposing more sanctions will move our interests forward. Does anyone actually believe that the Iranian regime - already suffering from a legitimacy problem at home - is going to come crawling to the negotiating table under pressure from Washington?

That is not going to happen. Iran is strategically important, and countries that are strategically important do not have trouble finding patrons. China and Russia can only hope that we will continue to force Iran and all of its energy resources into their arms.

The best way for Washington to shape Iranian behavior - including limiting the risk of Iran's nuclear program - is to normalize our relations with the Islamic Republic. Only if we enjoy a normal relationship with Iran will we be in a position to shape Iran's interests to our advantage.

-- Ben Katcher

One of the issues that has most irked me about the Obama administration's approach to trying to move the economy forward is a fundamental misunderstanding about US national interests and how corporate behavior works.

Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and the rest should know that the moment that US tax dollars pass the transom into the hands of corporate executives or even guarantee their financial decisions, those firms and their behavior must change from their normal operating habits to those which address the general needs of the American taxpayer.

But what we have seen is an Obama White House caught off guard by firms that took vast sums of American taxpayer dollars and paid them off many on their times with hefty bonuses. The most striking statistic is that financial firms that received bailout money have since last September's crisis issued more than 5,000 people bonuses of a million dollars or more.

The White House and Congress have flailed around attacking automotive CEOs for not flying commercial and ordering their own private jets (which Congress is now doing itself) and have tried to wrestle, mostly unsuccessfully, with CEOs about their executive pay.

What is going on here? Who is in the driver's seat?

Unfortunately, Timothy Geithner and Summers have continued the Hank Paulson strategy of begging banks and financial institutions to participate in the bailout programs that the government packaged together to recapitalize the American banking system. But the banks resisted, negotiated, and were able to get terms in the US-private sector relationship that undermined taxpayer interests while maximizing the firms'.

George Soros wrote in the fall of 2008 and has repeated since frequently that bank and financial sector recapitalization should have been compulsory and across the board. Non-performing loans should have been recognized on the bank's books and pushed to the side in an internal "old bank/new bank" structure that allowed to get the financial activities of the bank going again -- while the government assured the "old bank" portfolios -- and worked with the bank to steward those assets and guaranteed them until they could be brought back into the functioning bank.

Obama's team failed to listen to Soros and many others who recommended this sort of approach.

These firms thus got the upper hand -- and have been able to take US government taxpayer money to subsidize behaviors that are from a macro level quite disconcerting.

According to numerous sources I have spoken with and in some of the TARP oversight commentary, many of these financial firms are carrying a large load of non-performing loans financing commercial real estate. There is a "pretend and extend" game underway in which the bank/financial entity pretends that there has been little or no fall in the value of a major commercial real estate loan and extends the loan forward to keep the unrecognized losses off of its books. Regulators are involved in these institutions -- and are complicit in this "pretend and extend" game.

Another bit of disturbing news is this tidbit from Naked Capitalism today in which many banks are turning up their noses at small business finance deals, in part subsidized by the Small Business Administration because the profits are too small.

Yves Smith writes:

The 1980s supermodel Linda Evangelista once said. "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day." That seems to be the motto of American bankers, (save Citigroup's Andrew Hall, who needs 40 times that much per business day). Not only do they not care about things banks used to deem as important, like playing a role in their community, now they can't even be bribed to go along with pretending that they care.

The latest object lesson is the complete lack of interest in banks in a new SBA lending program. The banks say the loans are too small and too much trouble to be worth the bother, even with a Federal subsidy. I gather it doesn't occur to them if banks don't lend to small businesses, which have been the only engine of job growth, we won't have much improvement in unemployment, and if unemployment doesn't fall, we won't have a much in the way of recovery, and if we don't have much of a recovery, they won't have much of a business. The banks want to be a free riders on someone else doing whatever it takes to get the economy back in gear.

The government forfeited its leverage in the financial sector bailout early and should not have. No one wanted to say the word, "nationalization".

And to escape the catcalls from those engaged in semantic warfares, we have pursued a bank/financial sector subsidization scheme that has rewarded the very people who got the US into this mess.

And if the shoe drops on the commercial real estate sector, which I and a lot of people smarter than me believe will happen -- we may be back into the financial sector again, but then the terms will be even harder for the government because there is less uniformity of guilt and exposure in the next round.

Firms like Bank of America are doing a great deal to shore up reserves and to ride out a storm it sees coming. Banks like Citibank, partly because of the management of Bob Rubin and his like-minded allies, are chock-a-bloc with ongoing portfolio problems. Some banks are heavy with commercial real estate exposure and some have lightened their exposure significantly.

Next time, the government will be under great pressure to let these large institutions that it failed to properly and compulsorily recapitalize really fail -- but wait (!) -- those are the banks that the American taxpayers will pretty much own in full.

-- Steve Clemons

It seems that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's political shrewdness and theatrical performances have reached a whole new level. Whether you like him or not, consider him a democratic leader or a dictator, there is no denying the fact that Chavez has a unique ability to wiggle his way out of anything and come out looking like the underdog.

In the past few months, Chavez has been involved in a number of controversial incidences, from the coup in Honduras to weapon sales to the FARC in Colombia. However, no matter the accusations, Chavez has repeatedly managed to turn the tables, rallying the leaders of Latin America behind him and implicating the United States.

For instance, rather than acknowledging that Venezuela was partially to blame for the coup in Honduras because he supported Zelaya's call for a constitutional referendum, Chavez instead shifted attention to the United States, accusing the CIA of having orchestrated the military overthrow.

Chavez manipulated the situation to recast himself as the defender of victimized Honduras, the one who stood up as the David against the region's Goliath rather than the one who fueled the regressive coup. While Chavez's theory on the CIA has generally been dismissed, his maneuver was nonetheless a success as the accusatory murmurs directed towards Venezuela also dissipated and he was seen as standing up for Honduras.

Chavez performed a similar act more recently in response to the situation with the FARC in Colombia. At the beginning of August, new evidence surfaced confirming ties between Venezuela and the FARC. Not surprisingly, Chavez denied his support for and protection of the FARC despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary and only admitted to the fact that members of the FARC may occasionally cross the Venezuelan border.

However, being the politician-performer hybrid that he is, in addition to simply claiming innocence Chavez also created a diversion: the new military pact between the United States and Colombia.

In crafting this diversion Chavez withdrew (and then returned) the Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia, ended the subsidy of Colombian oil, and once again portrayed the United States as the enemy on which the region must focus its energy.

Chavez claimed that the new military pact "could start a war in South America" as "the Yankees are the most aggressive nation in the history of mankind" and Brazil, Ecuador, and Chile are all humoring his theory. With the leaders of these major countries turning their attention to the U.S. military bases, who has time to think about Venezuela's questionable exchanges with a guerrilla insurgency in Colombia?

The question then arises of whether or not Chavez's political feats will ever be too much for the people of Latin America to tolerate. The adversarial relationship with the United States that Chavez instigates and sustains seems to be somewhat craved by the region. His theatrics and constant figuring of Latin America as the victim of capitalist greed and U.S. imperialism have been an essential element of U.S.-Latin America relations as well as regional domestic politics for many decades now.

It is possible, however, that this dynamic will not be intrinsic to U.S.-Latin America politics forever. It is important to recognize that though Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, and Chile tolerate Chavez, they are not fooled by his theatrics. On the contrary, they are shrewd politicians who understand that in humoring Chavez they can appease their leftist constituents and maintain their own power.

At the same time, this game could quickly turn from clever to dangerous. Supporting terrorist groups such as the FARC and endorsing constitutional referendums that undermine democratic institutions may eventually prove harmful to those now benefiting from Chavez's friendship.

-- Caroline Esser

Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation/Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative and author of the AfPak Daily Brief. This post originally appeared on the AfPak Channel, a new joint venture between the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy to explain and analyze the conflict in South Asia.

I've just come from live-tweeting a conference with Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and members of his interagency team hosted by the Center for American Progress. While there were certainly substantive issues discussed (the role of Iran, the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan, the state of the Pakistani Taliban post-Baitullah Mehsud), what caught my attention was a flippant quip by the ambassador.

Asked about how to measure success and progress in Afghanistan, Holbrooke remarked, "In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue: We'll know it when we see it."

A universal head-desk rippled through the Twitterverse, with Foreign Policy blogger Mark Lynch tweeting "Feel reassured?" and Spencer Ackerman chiming in with "Is there alcohol here?" CAP's Brian Katulis asked, "Will 'we know it when we see it' be convincing enough for the American people and the Hill, focused on econ and health care?" and FP's own Josh Keating drew the parallel, "Holbrooke suggests AfPak success like pornography: 'we'll know it when we see it.'" Harvard's Stephen Walt has added his two cents here.

Metrics in Afghanistan are hard. That much is obvious. There's also potential peril in being held to standards that you may or may not be able to meet. But Katulis hit the nail on the head: "We'll know it when we see it" is not a convincing enough argument for the public and policymakers. And since President Obama has made accountability a pillar of his Afghanistan policy, I'm hoping Holbrooke's comment was just an attempt to be funny and nothing more than that.

National Security Advisor Jim Jones has reportedly "approved a classified policy document on July 17 setting out nine broad objectives for metrics to guide the administration's policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan," but another couple of months are needed to work out the details. One metric under consideration is an opinion poll to gauge how corrupt Afghans think their public officials are.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has said that another measure of success is the number of civilians protected, not the number of Taliban militants killed (and indeed, CENTCOM is not publicizing the latter). Although that first metric is much harder to calculate, it shows the Obama administration's focus on implementing counterinsurgency strategies in the Afghan theater.

Another yardstick of progress will be how legitimate the international community considers the August 20 presidential elections. With incumbent President Hamid Karzai's supporters allegedly trying to buy voter registration cards and security concerns about safety on polling day rampant, to put it mildly, this is a challenge. Holbrooke said at the conference that he's leaving it up to the media to determine whether the elections are legitimate, but one of his interagency team members, British diplomat Jane Marriott, clarified that the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan will handle complaints.

You can check out my live-tweeting along with that of several other colleagues by clicking here.

-- Katherine Tiedemann

In this video blog, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev laments the deteriorating relations between Moscow and Kiev, and explains his decision to recall Russia's ambassador to Ukraine for an indefinite period.

In a letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Medvedev listed a range of grievances including Ukraine's support for Georgia in last year's Russia-Georgia war, it's efforts to join NATO, and its energy policy.

Clearly President Medvedev is making a concerted effort to raise the stakes and perhaps to influence the internal dynamics within Ukraine.

It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration responds to all of this. As Vice President Biden's trips to Georgia and Ukraine last month demonstrated, it is difficult to improve the climate of U.S.-Russian relations without abandoning westward-oriented governments in Eastern Europe.

While the conflict between Moscow and Kiev may seem like a simple case of Russia bullying a weaker neighbor, American policy makers should note this Gallup poll. Here is what the poll found

Eighty-five percent of Ukrainians in May told Gallup they disapprove of the job performance of their country's leadership, up from 75% in 2008 and 73% in 2007. The 4% of Ukrainians who approve is not only the lowest rating Gallup has ever measured in former Soviet countries, but also the lowest in the world.

That's right. The Ukrainian leadership enjoys the lowest popular support in the world.

That discontent stems in part from a deep divide in Ukrainian society as to whether Ukraine should ally itself with the West or with Russia. As this article explains, the regime supports NATO membership, but a majority of Ukrainians are opposed.

Before the Obama administration embarks on a path of steadfast support for Ukraine's integration into NATO, as Vice President Biden did last month, the United States would be wise to consider encouraging Ukraine to develop an internal consensus on the issue first.

A patient posture is not acquiescence to Russian demands. It is sensible policy.

-- Ben Katcher

Today the "Three Amigos" wrapped up the annual two-day summit between Canada, Mexico, and the United States with a press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico. Expectations going into the summit were muted as the leaders mostly followed up on previously agreed upon measures rather than breakthrough negotiations over new issues. The three heads of state, President Calderon of Mexico, Prime Minister Harper of Canada, and President Obama, presented a happy trio at the press conference where they outlined the regional priorities agreed upon during their meetings.

The North American response to the economic crisis and efforts to increase regional competitiveness was a top priority for the leaders. Of special concern is the "protectionist wave sweeping the U.S." Canada and Mexico would be especially hard hit by the "buy America" clause in the $787 billion stimulus package as they are our number one and three trading partners respectively. Mexico has the added grief of addressing the congressionally-imposed ban prohibiting the use of US highways by Mexican trucks. Hoping to ease the fears of our two closest neighbors, President Obama promised to "reject protectionism" and work to expand regional trade, not limit it.

Health and security were also top of the agenda with a special focus on the impeding return of the H1N1 virus (the virus formerly known as the swine flu) to the region. The three leaders committed their countries to working together to prepare for the coming flu season. When it comes to transnational issues such as global health, a regional approach is not only prudent, it is required.

Mexico's war on drugs is another security matter of great concern for the region. Canada and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to supporting Calderon's fight against the powerful drug cartels. President Obama was clear that human rights must not be sacrificed to win this fight, which touched on a sore spot between Mexico and the United States. The US Congress is currently withholding funds promised in plan Merida because of human rights concerns arising from harsh tactics used by the Mexican military.

The leaders also addressed climate change and energy concerns, each calling for agreement and action at the upcoming UN Climate Change conference to take place in Copenhagen later this year. President Obama hailed the example being set for other developing countries by Mexico's actions to cut carbon emissions in a creative way that did not stifle economic growth.

An interesting point that came up in the Q&A portion of the press conference was the critique that the United States is not putting enough pressure on the government of Honduras to reseat ousted President Zelaya. In a response clearly aimed at Hugo Chavez, Obama stated, "The same critics who say the United States is not intervening enough in Honduras are the same that say we interfere too much and tell the Yankees to get out of Latin America. They can't have it both ways." President Calderon echoed this sentiment by stating that the United States is doing exactly what Latin America wants them to do, which is primarily to support regional organizations. It was, however, Prime Minister Harper that had the money quote of the day, "I'm just going to also weigh in a little bit, as a friend of the United States, on that question that was posed to President Obama. If I were an American, I would be really fed up with this kind of hypocrisy. You know, the United States is accused of meddling except when it's accused of not meddling."

-- Faith Smith

The news last week of the alleged killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has sparked a round of confused and contradictory messages from various parties.

American and Pakistani officials claim with more and more certainty that Mehsud is dead. Meanwhile, elements of the Pakistani Taliban admitted his death and announced a shura, or gathering, to decide a new Taliban leader, while others strongly asserted that Mehsud is alive, kicking, and making videos to prove it.

While there is at this writing no DNA proof that Mehsud is dead, the strong message from American and Pakistani officials, coupled with persistent reports of fighting between Taliban leaders Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali Ur-Rehman leads me to believe that Mehsud is either dead or out of commission.

Yet while apparently successful, strikes such as this show the potential benefits - as well as limitations - of targeted killings. New America Fellow Nicholas Schmidle explains that Mehsud has been "losing his mojo" of late, and that his killing might weaken the Taliban, but will not eliminate the organization or make Pakistan more willing to cooperate in bringing down other Taliban leaders with closer relationships to Pakistan's military. So while killing Mehsud is a good step, more will be required to effectively diminish the threat from the Taliban, on both sides of the Durand Line.

For more on the news coming out of the region, today is the launch date for a new special project from Foreign Policy and the New America Foundation, the AfPak Channel. Edited and managed by Peter Bergen, the co-director of New America's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, and Katherine Tiedemann, the policy analyst with the same program, as well as by Blake Hounshell and Susan Glasser at FP, the AfPak Channel carries original content and analysis from many of today's top experts on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and terrorism.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Reports are in on the new Richard Gere film, Hachiko: A Dog Story. All of my friends who saw it were in tears. They said it's sort of a Marley and Me type deal.

Enough of Hachiko -- but I did want to post my picture with the famous dog's commemorative statue.

Back to serious stuff shortly.

-- Steve Clemons

Some newer readers may not know that there are a substantial number of TWN readers who actually come to the blog for the pup pictures -- not my content or even to read our various dueling commentators.

So, here is a great picture of Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner, Buddy & Annie that had been held up in a camera for a while.

I showed it to someone night before last who said I ought to see if I could get Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, and Timothy Geithner to pose the same way -- and then I cut off her mojitos.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Actor Richard Gere allegedly cried when he first read about the tale of a Japanese akita named Hachiko waiting at the Shibuya train station each day for its master who had died and never showed up.

The Hachiko statue is one of the most famous "meeting places" in Japan -- and when I was there in June, I spent quite a bit of time hanging out in Hachiko's plaza.

One of the disturbing parts of Hachiko's history -- for which the pup himself was not responsible -- is that right wing Japanese nationalists used the Hachiko story as a way to propogandize the loyalty of the Japanese people to the Emperor during the war -- supporting the Emperor under any conditions.

The movie, Hachiko: A Dog Story, opened today in Japan -- but it's not scheduled for release yet in the United States.

From the short bit of trailer posted above, my hunch is that the film does not get into the dicey issue of emperor worship.

-- Steve Clemons

President Obama is out fast embracing the better than expected drop in employment stating that "the worst may be behind us" on the recession.

Quick counterpoint. A month to month job loss figure of 247,000 jobs is huge on any normal scale -- and just because it isn't of the same scale we saw in previous months doesn't mean that we don't have an enormous set of hurdles ahead.

It's quite disconcerting that Americans are still losing their homes and that even voices like Martin Feldstein are saying that more needs to be done to put a floor on the housing market -- and that foreclosures need to be put in temporary pause.

Also, many analysts see a year of state level "de-stimulative shocks" that undermine the impact of the expansionary policy that the White House and Fed are pursuing. The vicious, deep-cutting budget battles that have played out this year in California are likely to play out in state after state over the next year.

There's nothing wrong with trying to boost confidence in the country -- but when consumption of autos is tied to a coupon strategy, when a quarter of a million people are added to those who can't even afford to buy with those cash-for-clunker coupons -- the White House should not be smug about America's economic situation.

-- Steve Clemons

I hope all of you are having decent weekends. I am and am blessed with this view just a 30 second stroll from where I am staying.

I happened to run into Nobel Economics Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his wife Anya Schiffrin near here and am trying to nudge him to do a blog post with me. Not sure I have fully convinced him yet but will keep you posted.

I am going to go down to this beautiful beach now and ponder memories of my friend, Anne Wexler, who died this morning.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

No doubt the elephant in the room at last week's U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was the dramatic shift in economic momentum between the two powers: the most recent economic reports from each nation confirm that China's economy grew by a startling 7.9 percent in the second quarter of 2009, while the American economy has contracted by 1 percent.

To some, these numbers are a sure sign that the U.S. is slipping from its perch atop the global economy. But aggregate macroeconomics is an incomplete lens through which to assess China's potential displacement of the U.S. as the world's economic superstar. A society can truly be said to be the world's most prosperous when it becomes an international destination for those seeking a better life, not just a favorite of economists and investors. And by that metric, at least, the U.S. still retains its clout.

Consider the statistics surrounding Chinese migration to the U.S. According to the Department of Homeland Security, in 2008 Chinese immigrants comprised the second-largest proportion of legal permanent residents flowing into the U.S. (7.3 percent) and almost one-quarter of asylum seekers in 2008 - more than 3.3 times as much as Colombia, the next largest source nation.

The reality behind these numbers - particularly the large number of asylum-seekers - speaks to the fact that it takes more than a growing GDP to ensure the socioeconomic and political conditions we associate with a high quality of life. In The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, author Patrick Radden Keefe confirms as much: chronicling the story of the snakehead, a human smuggling ring run out of New York City, Keefe shows that migrants from China's Fujianese province are willing to risk life and limb - and pay thousands of dollars - to pile into a cramped, leaky boat and sail to the U.S.

Importantly, these dramatic escapes became increasingly common during the 1980s and 1990s, a period of economic transformation in China. Indeed, the snakehead trade had grown into a $3.5 billion a year industry by the mid-1990s. According to Keefe's research, the immigrants' motivations lay beyond simplistic measurements: they came for the opportunity to earn incomes in U.S. currency, for freedom from political corruption and repression, and to escape China's one-child policy.

Economic growth is not likely to affect these motivating factors any time soon. Though China is making moves to internationalize its currency through measures such as currency swap agreements with banks, it's unlikely that the Communist Party will be comfortable loosening its control of capital to the extent necessary for the renminbi to become a reserve currency. Indeed, in an economy such as China's it is impossible to consider economics independent of politics. For example: consumption in China remains so low that it threatens economic recovery in part because workers do not trust the integrity of the public social security system and thus save for retirement at high rates.

Further, economic growth may in fact hasten the outflow of Chinese to the U.S. Research by Mette Thuno of the University of Copenhagen suggests that economic development increases migration in developing countries by connecting them to global markets as well as increasing inequality, which introduces a sense of "relative deprivation" to those who are left behind and drives them to seek out new lives abroad. Perhaps ominously then, while the Chinese economy has grown, household incomes have steadily declined as a share of national income, meaning families are seeing less and less of China's economic boom.

Lastly, China's one-child policy, another impetus for many asylum seekers, is actually an important part of China's economic growth strategy in that it helps to maintain manageable population levels. Thus government officials insist that the policy will remain in place for at least another decade, despite protests from Chinese citizens - which means it will remain a motivation for people to leave China.

For these reasons, the U.S. will retain much of its economic standing in the global imagination, even if China beats it out in certain raw metrics. While observers may laud China's GDP gains, the average Chinese citizen may well continue to praise people like Sister Ping, the colorful New York-based smuggler who is both the central character in Keefe's account and - as noted by author Alex Kotlowitz - a Harriet Tubman folk hero among certain Chinese populations.

-- Niko Karvounis

While the media are drawn to the story of the day, which today means the killing of Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan and the longevity of the "cash for clunkers" program here at home, it is essential for the Obama administration to keep its eye on the strategic ball. In short, while the administration was absolutely right to triage the domestic economy and global crises like Iraq and Afghanistan during its first six months, the President and his most senior advisors must now turn to the great questions of statecraft: great power relations and America's role in the world.

The reality is that the post-war global order, in which the United States asserted a de facto strategy of hegemony, is now irretrievably dysfunctional and, when it comes down to it, triggered the domestic and foreign crises that consumed the president's agenda until now.

That old strategy, as our colleague Michael Lind has written, was founded on a simple bargain: Washington would let the rest of the world export to the American consumer, hollowing out our own manufacturing base but subsidizing our consumer lifestyle. In return, we would assert a kind of global hegemony, using the tools of foreign policy (our military budget and capabilities) to dissuade the rise of peer competitors, to reassure the world's powers that we would take care of common threats (Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia), and in those cases of resistance to our hegemony, to coercively disarm them (Iran, North Korea).

It was always a time-limited gambit and time finally ran out a year ago when the economic foundation of the strategy collapsed spectacularly in the U.S. housing crisis. Addicted to the false security of bundled American home mortgages, Wall Street built a house of un-priceable derivatives on the sand of irresponsible sub-prime mortgages - fueled by easy access to credit provided by exporting nations like China, Japan, Germany and the Gulf States. Borrowing against rising home prices to keep consumption high, American households lost trillions in home value and cut back dramatically on consumption - such that Chinese exports fell 30 percent.

At the same time, our over-stretched military was finding it harder and harder to find the budget and the manpower to match the operations tempo that hegemony required. And despite today's confirmation of Baitullah Mehsud's death, it looks increasingly like that operations tempo will only remain high, if not get higher.

Furthermore, the basic strategic facts on the ground have changed dramatically since the early 1990s when hegemony was proffered during the George H. W. Bush administration.

China is now a massive economy whose GDP is more about building China then exporting cheap goods to the West. Russia is no longer the post-Soviet basket case it was under Boris Yeltsin, for Vladimir Putin has marshaled its energy resources and nuclear arsenal to make it a real force in the many strategic issues along and beyond its incredibly long frontier.

Europe, meanwhile, used the last two decades to absorb Eastern Europe and along the way avoided getting into a balance of trade trap with Asia. Japan remains a major creditor of the United States and is increasingly concerned that American security guarantees in East Asia are not what they once were. Indeed, the combined economies of Russia, China, India and Brazil are likely to outstrip those of the G-7 in twenty years time, according to Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jim O'Neil.

Luckily, this new reality points directly to the major issues that require a new great power agreement: global macroeconomic rebalancing, the need to adapt and manage global energy markets, and establishing global and regional collective security architectures.

The most immediate challenge is to begin rebalancing the global economy in a way that promotes sustainable global growth. The American consumption-led model of global growth is not coming back. The great powers must work together to create and balance new sources of domestic demand within their own territories. The United States and China in particular must conceive a new economic relationship that reduces the massive trade and capital flow imbalances at the root of the present economic recession. This will require a combination of policies that reorient China's economy toward domestic demand and develop a new economic engine to power the United States for the coming decades.

Of equal importance is energy. The United States' Energy Information Agency 2009 Energy Outlook predicts that global energy consumption will increase 44% from 2006-2030. Anticipating this increase in demand and the corresponding increase in prices, the great powers have so far conceived of energy security as a largely zero-sum game, and competed with one another for access to hydrocarbon resources from Africa to Central Asia to the Arctic Pole.

Russia, China and the United States all rely on a highly volatile and fragile global energy system. Such volatility, however, has had negative impacts on each of the great powers in recent years. The rise in oil prices accelerated the financial crisis in the United States, in China, high energy prices forced government energy subsidies that, for a while, took the profit out of their export sector. While in Russia, falling prices undercut government subsidies to its uncompetitive industries and massive pensioner class.

With Russia and Europe competing over access to Caspian and Central Asian energy, with Russia, China, and the United States competing over Iranian energy resources and the U.S. and China signing a memorandum of understanding committing both to work toward a "low carbon economy," the geopolitics of energy will continue to shape the strategic outlook of great powers unless something changes. A new energy order that allows economies to develop, transform and function while facilitating global stability and prosperity is in all the powers' interest but is as of yet hard to discern.

Finally, the security arrangements and institutions that guided the United States through the Cold War must be updated to reflect current power realities. This requires a serious effort at global institutional reform as well as the creation of capable regional security structures that allow for rules-based regional resolution of threats to international security.

At the global level, the UN Security Council and the International Financial Institutions need to reflect the realities of today, not 1945. Looking to models like NATO and the EU, regional organizations like ASEAN, the African Union, and the Rio Group need to increase their capability to promote regional stability and sustainable economic integration. Governor George W. Bush was right: the United States should not be the world's policeman.

As President Obama emerges from his first six months of domestic and global triage, conventional wisdom believes that his next priorities should be the usual laundry list: health care, climate change, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea. But a deeper look at these issues, we believe, reveals that most of them can be made much more tractable if the President first strikes a durable great power bargain with Russia and China.

The reasons for focusing on Russia and China should be clear. Russia because of the leverage provided by its energy resources and infrastructure and its nuclear arsenal, and China because of its rising economy and massive population. Europe, Japan, India and Brazil are, of course, real or rising world powers and must be accommodated in any new global concert, but their interests, capabilities, outlook and strategies simply do not cross the great power threshold.

Of the three great powers, the United States is in the strongest position to lead such an agenda. Our post Cold War grand strategy has met its natural death and the Obama administration came into office with a mandate to not only deliver change we can believe in, but specifically to "change the mindset" that led the United States to war in Iraq. Meanwhile, China and Russia are in the opposite position: their ability to adapt their grand strategies to a new American agenda is extremely limited, giving the United States a significant silver lining.

But there is not much time. Grand strategy must be conceived of and executed well in advance of political judgment days. There are less than three years before the Obama administration must report on its progress to the American electorate and Russia and China's current strategies are every day reducing American maneuverability and options.

It's time to focus.

-- Patrick Doherty and Ben Katcher

(post-2007 Australian American Leadership Dialogue Dinner: Anne Keating, Anne Wexler, Steve Clemons, Lesley Russell, Bruce Wolpe, Former Prime Minister Paul Keating; photo credit: Ambassador Joseph Duffey)

One of the people who opened many otherwise closed doors for me in Washington, DC is Anne Wexler -- an amazing politico in Washington married to the equally peripatetic former USIA Director Joseph Duffey.

Anne passed away this morning after a long and valiant fight with cancer. I'm off on Tuesday next week to Melbourne and Sydney to participate in the Australian American Leadership Dialogue which Anne Wexler helped to found and would not have been brought into this interesting group without her strong support.

There were many of the great and the good who have been stopping in to see Anne these last few weeks. I know that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton both spent time with Anne as well -- and she left feeling quite whole and good about her amazing life.

I will very much miss Anne who was a great friend and really special to me.

She was an enormous supporter of my work and this blog.

-- Steve Clemons

From her bio:

Anne Wexler is widely recognized as one of the top lobbyists in Washington. As recently as April 2008, she was named as one of the "Best in the Business: Hired Guns" by The Hill newspaper. In October, 2007, she was recognized as one of Washington's Top"Power 150" by Washingtonian magazine. The Washingtonian identified Ms. Wexler as one of only 13 lobbyists on the list of Washingtonians who "make things happen." Washingtonian has also named Ms. Wexler as one of Washington's 10 most powerful lobbyists.

Ms. Wexler served as an Assistant to President Carter for Public Liaison from 1978-1981. As his chief deputy charged with building support for White House programs and policies, Ms. Wexler is credited with ushering in a new form of public advocacy by engaging the strategic use of outside coalitions and grassroots networks.

Previously, Ms. Wexler served as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce, coordinating the department's programs and field operations and directing the department's Office of State and Local Governments. During her tenure at Commerce, Ms. Wexler also served as Chair of the President's Task Force on Women Business Owners.

Ms. Wexler currently serves as a Director of the Dreyfus Family of Funds. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Boards of the Washington Economic Club, The Community Foundation, the National Parks and Conservation Association and WETA, Washington's Public Broadcasting Station.

In 1989, Ms. Wexler received the Bryce Harlow Award, presented annually to the government relations professional representing the highest standards of integrity and excellence. In 2002, Wexler received the Order of Australia in recognition of her distinguished service in the pursuit of American-Australian relations, an honor seldom conferred on non-Australians.

Ms. Wexler received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Skidmore College. Skidmore also awarded her the Outstanding Alumni Award in 1972 and the Most Distinguished Alumni Award in 1984. She holds an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Skidmore College and an Honorary Doctor of Science in Business Administration from Bryant College. She is married to Dr. Joseph Duffey, Senior Vice President of Laureate Education, Inc.

In today's Guardian, Tariq Ramadan argues that Europe must develop a unified policy of inclusion with regard to Turkey's EU membership bid.

I agree with the thrust of the article, which makes many of the same arguments I put forth in my article in World Politics Review last week.

Ramadan's most compelling argument is that Turkey isn't going anywhere. Europe is stuck with a large, influential Muslim Turkey on its borders whether or not it is included in the Union. Therefore it is in Europe's interests to use the carrot of membership in its club to shape Turkey's future.

The only point on which I disagree with Ramadan is when it comes to the time horizon for Turkey's membership. Ramadan implies that Turkey should earn membership soon when he says that "The only criteria to membership should be those of Copenhagen (1993) - and a European commission report (2004) mentioned that Turkey is very close to satisfying them."

But this analysis overlooks the fact that Turkey's reform program has slowed to a crawl since the European Commission report to which he refers was published in 2004. The Kurdish issue remains unsolved (despite the government's announcement this month of a "new plan" to resolve it.) The Constitution remains unreformed, and civil-military tensions remain unhealthily high. A better reference is the European Commission's 2008 report, which identifies these problems and more.

As the Romanian and Bulgarian cases demonstrate, quicker is not always better when it comes to joining the EU. The accession process provides a powerful incentive structure for potential members to reform. Once membership is granted, Europe loses a lot of its leverage.

For Turkey and for Europe, Turkey's EU membership is a means to an end. That end is a liberal, democratic Turkey that is at peace with itself and enjoys a healthy strategic, political, and economic partnership with Europe. This will require a long, deliberate accession process that only ends when Turkey has truly met the criteria of EU membership.

-- Ben Katcher

In the aftermath of Vice President Biden's visit to Georgia last month, Alexander Melikishvili over at the Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia blog provides an informative review of the Obama administration's unfolding Georgia policy.

Citing a variety of recent congressional testimonies, Melikishvili makes a persuasive case that the Obama team intends to exercise more caution than the Bush administration in terms of the kinds of military assistance that it is prepared to provide to the Saakashvili regime.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia Celeste A. Wallander's stated this bluntly in her recent congressional testimony:

But Georgia is not ready for the kind of weapons acquisitions that the President [Saakashvili] floated. In the future, that's not off the table, but certainly the United States is not in the position of believing that Georgia is ready for that kind of defense acquisition.

While I find his conclusion to be a bit alarmist, Melikishvili provides a bevy of useful quotes and links. You can read the entire post, called "Parameters of U.S. Military Assistance to Georgia Emerge from Congressional Hearings," here.

Tempering our support for Georgia is sound policy and appears to be the lowest hanging fruit as the Obama administration aims to reset relations with Russia - but our Georgia policy needs to be part of a broader conversation with both the Russians and the Chinese about our ambitions in the post-Soviet space.

-- Ben Katcher

Reading Vaclav Havel's "To The Castle and Back" yesterday, I got wildly distracted, and found myself YouTubing my DC power/intellect crush: the luminous Samantha Power.

Havel's book is a tremendous read -- scattered and tangential, but fascinating nonetheless. It feels as if one sat down at the playwright's cluttered desk in 2003, and was privileged to rifle through memos and diary entries and jotted 'notes to self,' scattered recklessly about.

The line from the memoir that brought me to Power, and to Sergio De Mello, began from a query about leaving so much of the communist bureaucracy intact in the Czech government. Havel responds, "after the Velvet Revolution, personnel changes were more difficult and took a longer time. You can't produce a thousand judges overnight."

It reminded me of something Martti Ahtisaari told me last winter: that in nearly all the places he has worked, we've been dangerously slow to bring the rule of law up to speed, and, in particular, business law.

As we begin to re-imagine the world for the twenty-first century -- Sergio's world, as Power is fond of saying, of "broken people and broken states" -- it seems that building successful legal systems needs a bigger niche than we typically afford.

Global warming, and all that it will bring to the forefront -- power outages, food shortages, increased tropical storms generated by larger and warmer incubating zones that stay heated for longer -- should lead us to expect more faltering governments and broken systems.

Law is often listed in a litany of woes: corruption, education reform, poverty reduction, clean water, health care expansion -- but it needs to begin to rise above.

Hamas won Gaza on a justice and anti-corruption platform; the Taliban, we know, draws a good deal of its support from providing a perverted justice in place of lawlessness; there's no disputing that stability follows security in counterinsurgency.

The incredible success of military exchanges has often struck me. Whether it's American sponsorship of foreign officers to study at war colleges or merely simulations and war games that bring colonels and petty officers into contact, most in the armed forces can't speak highly enough of the relationships built and the exchanges of knowledge produced.

USAID does little in the way of legal sabbatical or fellowship, from what I can discern.

School of the Americas -- or whatever it's called now -- would be better replaced by schools of international law. Of course -- in reference to Havel's quote -- judges are not legal systems. Police, corrections systems, and any number of other factors are all intricate parts. As Power notes at about the 30 minute mark, police in the developing world are overwhelming oppressive forces, rather than martials of justice. De Mello, Power's argues, thought that strengthening the power and structure of law was key to avoiding human rights abuses.

How about some tax dollars to train lawyers rather than privates, high courts rather than high commands?

-- Brian Till

Here are my thoughts from an exchange with Keith Olbermann on Bill Clinton's surprise trip to Pyongyang to secure the release of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.

-- Steve Clemons

Bill Clinton is flying back to the US with just pardoned journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in North Korea.

It's great that they are free -- but deploying Bill Clinton to secure their release was not about bringing a complicated human drama to a close -- but rather to steady North Korea's unpredictable behavior and to hopefully set up a face-saving opportunity to resume nuclear negotiations.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry gets the tone exactly right in his public statement about the release of the journalists. In his statement, he quickly moves to the strategic issues that need attention.

Kerry states:

North Korea is doing the right thing by granting Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Lee amnesty and letting them return to their families. I hope this goodwill gesture will create a new, more positive tone in U.S.-DPRK relations. This joyous day belongs to them and their families, who never gave up hope that the women would be released.

The statement from his office goes on:

Senator Kerry has called on the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to promptly resume talks on denuclearization. According to Senator Kerry, "This moment shouldn't be lost. North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons is a threat to regional security and stands as an obstacle to what the people of North Korea most want: respect, security, development, and peace.

But the United States, in concert with the Republic of Korea, Japan, China and Russia -- our partners in the Six Party Talks -- remains willing to engage in a mutually respectful dialogue with the DPRK to accomplish the goals of denuclearization and normalization and to create a permanent peace mechanism for the Korean Peninsula."

Chronic North Korea-name caller John Bolton is furious -- but Bill Clinton has pulled a rabbit out of the hat and given the Obama administration a new opportunity to rein in North Korea's nuclear proclivities.

I'll post my video segment about this high wire diplomatic act from Keith Olbermann's Countdown shortly.

-- Steve Clemons

Tonight at about 8:15 pm EST and then again at 10:15 pm EST on Keith Olbermann's Countdown, I will be discussing Bill Clinton's successful trip to North Korea that not only secured pardons and expected release of imprisoned journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling -- but may have brought other constructive currents to the US-North Korea relationship which has been in fast, downward spiral.

-- Steve Clemons

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry might have brought Senatorial gravitas to the US-North Korea relationship and have opened connections for Pyongyang beyond the White House. Al Gore, if he had gone to help secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from the hard labor camp where they have been incarcerated, would have diversified his public profile. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, had he gone, would have added to his somewhat legendary roster of successful engagements with global thugs to try and secure the release of innocent people from the trap of hard-edged international tensions.

But Bill Clinton, who is today in North Korea, ignored potential landmines and surprisingly took on the challenge of engaging North Korea to win the release of these journalists. For his efforts, Clinton will most likely reap significant political credits with Barack Obama and his team -- not just for pulling a Bill Richardson and getting the woman out of the hole they were in -- but for steadying a US-North Korea relationship that was in a fast downward spiral.

As for State Department official and Korea Society President Evans J.R. Revere told me today, sending Bill Clinton was a significant "High Risk, High Reward" strategy for both Barack Obama and Clinton himself. Although everyone goes to great pains to state that Clinton's trip was a private trip, everyone -- particularly North Korea premier Kim Jong Il -- knows that the trip had both Obama's support and Hillary Clinton's.

Revere, who has been engaged in some private diplomacy himself with the North Koreans about the two journalists, felt that Clinton had the most to lose from this trip among all of the other potential unofficial envoys -- and also the most to gain for American policy overall. The North Koreans could have embarrassed the former President and could have engaged in some unsavory behavior to continue to show how they wished to defy the international community's demands. But Kim Jong Il, pictured with a wide smile in photos next to the more solemn Clinton, rolled out the red carpet for the President and seemed extremely pleased with Clinton's outreach.

Evans Revere, who used to manage the North Korea portfolio at the State Department, has been working quietly over the past several weeks with the North Koreans from his Korea Society perch in New York to encourage them to resolve the journalist issue quickly. He reported to me that he had a number of "intense and useful, even positive, exchanges" -- the results of which he had shared with the administration. Revere protege David Straub -- who also used to be at the State Department -- is traveling with Bill Clinton. Center for American Progress President and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta is also on the trip. Evans Revere was also in constant touch with one of the family members of one of the imprisoned journalists.

Given the spade work done by a number of players -- through formal and informal channels -- Bill Clinton has now secured pardons from Kim Jong Il for the two journalists who he has now met with -- but more importantly, Clinton has engaged directly with North Korea President Kim Jong Il and this may steady things in Northeast Asia for a bit.

As one observer told me today, engaging Kim directly matters and prevents the complex filters around him from distorting and derailing earnest efforts to get the relationship pointed in a more constructive direction. Former Japan Prime Minister Koizumi learned this through two direct meetings with Kim, and the Chinese and South Koreans also have learned that direct engagement with the North Korean leader produces radically different results than dealing with the bureaucratic minions around him.

Clinton may have just given North Korea a "face-saving way" back to negotiations in the Six Party Talks -- and North Korea may have found a valuable informal back channel to both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to partially sate its own yearning for direct bilateral talks with the United States that America can't endorse given other stakeholders in Northeast Asia committed to a six party process.

And by the way, John Bolton, political market indicator that he is, is on the verge of another apoplectic fit, which generally means that the Obama White House is on a good course.

-- Steve Clemons

Lehigh University International Relations Department Chair Rajan Menon recently published an informative report for the Century Foundation called "The China-Russia Relationship: What It Involves, Where It Is Headed, And How It Matters For The United States."

The report provides a useful framework for conceptualizing the relationships among China, Russia, and the United States.

Menon makes a persuasive case that while the "strategic partnership" between Russia and China is based in large part on a shared aversion to unchecked American power, a full-fledged anti-American alliance is unlikely to develop.

The report refutes assertions by the British historian Niall Ferguson and others that Russia and China are engaged in a classic balance of power alliance to counter American influence.

Such an alliance is unlikely for several reasons. Neither Russia nor China believes that an alliance could effectively balance American influence given the United States' extraordinary military and economic advantages, China agrees with Joe Biden that Russia is a weak and declining power, and Russia envisions itself as part of the West and views China's rise with jealousy and suspicion. Furthermore, geographical proximity makes Russia and China natural competitors in Central Asia and the Russian Far East.

The bottom line is that both Russia and China benefit more from their relations with the West than from their relations with each other.

Menon's analyses of the United States' bilateral relationships with Russia and China are strong because he avoids a U.S.-centric perspective and explains how Beijing and Moscow perceive their interests and their relationships with Washington. His acknowledgments that the United States' unilateral decision to abandon the ABM treaty and its obsessive commitment to NATO expansion have been counter-productive are particularly welcome.

One quibble I have with Menon's argument is his statement that "While talk of a Russian-American cold war is ubiquitous in Russia and the United States, there is no parallel categorization about the Beijing-Washington relationship, either in Beijing or Washington."

While you wouldn't know it from last week's Strategic and Economic Dialogue "love fest," there is in fact a large and influential group of China hard-liners based primarily at the Pentagon and in the armed services that views China as an emerging military superpower and conceives the U.S.-China relationship in zero-sum terms. While these views have been crowded out in recent years, they most certainly exist and could resurface in the event of a crisis.

Menon correctly identifies one of the main reasons that the China hard-liners in Washington have been sidelined. The enormous trade and investment flows between the two countries ensure that there are strong domestic constituencies in both countries with a stake in the relationship. The lack of these constituencies is one of the biggest obstacles to stronger U.S.-Russian relations. Menon says

The problems...are compounded by the ease with which the relationship with Russia can be damaged because of the lack of influential constituencies within America that have a strong stake in shoring it up, let alone expanding it. The pro-China business lobby in America has no pro-Russian counterpart, and while there are university professors and op-ed writers who argue strenuously that the relationship with Russia is important and should be strengthened, who has lost money betting on their lack of influence?

One other interesting insight from the article is that while much is made of Russia's dependence on arms sales to China (which make up about 10% of Russia's export earnings), China is at least as dependent on Russia in this area. Because of Washington's ban, Russia is the only place that China can buy state of the art weaponry.

The full text of Menon's article can be found here, and is well worth a read.

-- Ben Katcher

Tomorrow morning, at about 7:15 am EST, I'll be chatting about Hillary Clinton's seven nation tour through Africa on WNYC/National Public Radio's "The Takeaway."

-- Steve Clemons

Amjad Atallah directs the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal told Jay Solomon and Julien Barnes-Dacey in an interview that "We along with other Palestinian factions in consensus agreed upon accepting a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines. This is the national program. This is our program. This is a position we stand by and respect." Meshaal also insisted that Hamas would commit to an immediate reciprocal cease-fire with Israel and a prisoner swap.

Anti-Hamas activists will note that he also insisted that he would accept and respect a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders "as part of a broader peace agreement with Israel" if Israel accepted the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and the establishment of a capital for the Palestinian state in East Jerusalem.

But what is fascinating is that Meshaal has in fact, parroted the official negotiating position of the PLO and of Fatah. Even though a number of PLO leaders have privately admitted to Israelis that they might forgo the right of return in exchange for the 1967 borders, this has never been the official negotiating position and even President Mahmoud Abbas has publicly stuck to the line that there needs to be a "just and agreed" resolution of the refugee issue. On East Jerusalem, there is no daylight between the Hamas and PLO position.

Most importantly, Meshaal seems to be indicating that Hamas now endorses the US attempt to negotiate an end to the occupation.

In the past, Hamas' position has been that that they would allow President Abbas, as leader of the PLO, to negotiate while they remained the pious opposition, undoubtedly back-biting his attempts to conclude an agreement and presenting the results as a sell-out. It was politics at its most cynical. But in Friday's WSJ piece, Meshaal is quoted saying "Hamas and other Palestinian groups are ready to cooperate with any American, international or regional effort to find a just solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, to end the Israeli occupation and to grant the Palestinian people their right of self-determination."

If Meshaal is truly speaking on behalf of all of Hamas (and Hamas is much better at speaking with a unified voice than most Palestinian parties), then he is actually endorsing President Obama's efforts to quickly negotiate an end to the conflict and is offering Hamas "cooperation" in that regard.

A few months ago, I was in Israel and the Occupied Territory. Many of the Israeli officials with whom I met insisted that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah wanted them to continue the siege on the civilians in Gaza in order to maintain pressure on Hamas. But in meetings with members of Salaam Fayyad's new cabinet, including Fatah members, they were adamant that this wasn't true.

Speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister, Minister of National Economy Bassem Khoury insisted that the best way to promote peace and the legitimacy of their government was to flood the Gaza Strip with commercial goods, food, and reconstruction equipment. Minister of Public Works Mohamed Shtayyeh, a prominent Fatah leader, agreed and noted that the best and only way to compete with Hamas was in the realm of politics. He had been and remained confident that Fatah could more than hold its own against Hamas if the United States was serious about negotiating an end to the occupation. (You can see an interview my colleague Steve Clemons did with him some months ago here.) Fatah is scheduled to host its Sixth Congress next week which will elect a new generation of leaders (and undoubtedly reaffirm some of the old generation). This may only strengthen their self-confidence.

It seems the divide among Palestinians is evolving. It may end up not being between Hamas and Fatah - both of whom are now on record supporting President Obama's efforts to negotiate an end to the occupation with the common negotiating stance that "justice" needs to be ensured for the refugees and East Jerusalem must become the Palestinian capital. The divide may be between those in Palestinian society who trust the democratic process to ensure the best Palestinian leaders rise to positions of authority and those who remain unconvinced of their own skills or their party's.

This is an excellent time for the United States government to begin finding ways to cement this progress (and maybe to quietly thank all those European and American statesmen who played a role in getting us this far) and to leverage it into the upcoming negotiations.

-- Amjad Atallah

I'm not meaning to mock anyone with this -- but here again is another priceless picture from a TWN reader visiting Okinawa, Japan -- which is speckled with nearly 40 separate US military institutions.

At some point though, one has to wonder whether these signs are really accidents or done on purpose to add to the charm?

-- Steve Clemons

This from a reader this morning in Okinawa, Japan.

Someone call Conan O'Brien quick.

-- Steve Clemons