2009 Annus Horriblus or the Year We Stopped Digging

Obama’s first year in office, while far from a foreign policy failure, has not brought resolution to any of the major challenges facing the U.S. Wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq; peace remains more elusive than ever in the Middle East; Iran is still on the brink of developing nuclear weapons; significant parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union remain concerned about renewed Russian power in that region and the global economic downturn has raised the possibility of political instability in much of the world. This was the capstone year of a decade that has included the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001, a conflict in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II, plummeting U.S. popularity abroad, the stalling, or even reversal, of the spread of democracy, and rising military, political and economic threats to the U.S. from Teheran to Beijing and from Moscow to Caracas.

Copenhagen, Darfur and New Perceptions of China

Blame for the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference to lead to a stronger agreement has, in many quarters, been assigned to China. A recent piece in The Guardian sums up this view very clearly. While it may not be entirely fair to blame this failure solely on China, and affluent countries including the U.S. and many in Europe are not, in the bigger picture, without blame for the climate change crisis, China clearly bears some of the responsibility for the relative failure in Copenhagen.

Making Job Creation a Priority →

Putting the more than fifteen million unemployed Americans back to work in the midst of an ongoing recession is not an easy task, so faulting the administration for not coming up with a brilliant and politically achievable plan for doing this is a little unfair. Nonetheless, the administration's position on jobs has at times suggested an unexpectedly poor understanding of the impact of the economic downturn on ordinary Americans.

Lincoln Mitchell