Atlantic Council

Brent Scowcroft, who followed Henry Kissinger as National Security Advisor to President Ford, introduced his friend last night as "one of the very few people who have truly strategic minds."  Kissinger demonstrated just that during the far-ranging speech that followed.

Perhaps the longest running foreign policy argument during the 2008 presidential campaign stemmed from Barack Obama's vowing during the July 2007 YouTube debate that he would be "willing to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries."

Earlier this week, I reported on the U.S. Defense Department's claims that as many as 61 former Guantanimo detainees had returned to terrorism.  My friend Steve Hynd, who blogs at Newshoggers and elsewhere, passes along a rather convincing rejoinder from Michael J. Ricciardelli of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy & Research.

In a Guardian op-ed and a speech in Mumbai, both today, British foreign secretary David Milibrand says that the "war on terror" was a bad idea.

Breaking news from AP:

Israeli forces shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, setting fire to the compound filled with hundreds of refugees as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was in the region on a mission to end Israel's devastating offensive against the territory's Hamas rulers.

Charles Dickens called Washington a "city of magnificent intentions." When Barack Obama takes over on January 20th as the 44th President of the United States, he will need to translate his own lofty ideas into realities.

What makes the challenge bigger for him is that he may also be carrying another title: the first globally-elected President of the United States.

Fed chair Ben Bernanke's gave a speech yesterday at the London School of Economics which noted that, while "more capital injections and guarantees may become necessary to ensure stability and the normalization of credit markets," other tools will need to be deployed.

It is hard to be amused by what now is an annual Ukraine-Russia gas dispute.  What surprises, is the continued lack of readiness in Europe to protect commerce and households from this problem.  The lack of viable alternatives is particularly evident in new Europe.

Atlantic Council president and CEO Fred Kempe was interviewed by EurActiv on the impending transition in the American presidency and, especially, the implications for U.S.

In the torrent of foreign policy advice flowing to Barack Obama from underemployed think-tankers, job auditioners and academics, most is in the form of prescriptions: what to do on Iran, Russia, Darfur, or the Israeli-Palestine issue. But how and when an administration pursues a policy — and deciding what not to do — can be as important as the actual policy.