Atlantic Council

U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have an opportunity this weekend as they address the Munich Security Conference to suggest ways to stabilize NATO’s ailing defense capabilities.

The Obama administration's acceleration of its Afghanistan withdrawal deadline to 2013, a year earlier than planned, is a break with America's commitment to its NATO and Afghan allies, an abandonment of a mission Obama deemed "essential" in his 2008 campaign, and kills any chances of negotiating an acceptable settlement with the Taliban. It's also the right thing to do.

The last convoy of US soldiers pulled out of Iraq on December 18, 2011, leaving Iraqis with mixed feelings: pride in gained sovereignty, but anxiety about sectarian violence and the inability of Iraq’s security forces to maintain peace on their own.

For the better part of five years, much of Somalia's long-suffering population has been caught in a deadly stalemate between al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group, and African Union peacekeepers, known as AMISOM.

Efforts to halt the killing in Syria shifted to the UN Security Council yesterday, where its members debated a draft resolution proposed by Morocco to end Bashar Al Assad’s reign of terror.

Alas poor Marx, Engels and Lenin. After being entirely discredited and disproved by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist ideology and repudiated by China’s embrace of market capitalism, perhaps they weren’t necessarily wrong. Instead, perhaps they were simply a century too early in their revolutionary aspirations!

A resolution adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on January 26 called for the release of political prisoners in Ukraine, including former prime minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko with “the possible consideration of sanctions if the Assembly's demands are not met.”

The core idea of the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy is that lasting peace and stability can only exist where governments guarantee their citizens security, prosperity, freedom, and equality.

It is not without historical irony that the only other country to stand with Britain over the Fiscal Compact at yesterday's EU Summit was the Czech Republic which Chamberlain sold out to Hitler at Munich in 1938. Last night Martin Callanan, the leader of British Conservatives in the European Parliament accused the Prime Minister of “appeasement”.

In this edition of the New Atlanticist Podcast, Atlantic Council senior fellow Sarwar Kashmeri speaks to Mr. Tutu Agyare, founder and managing partner of Nubuke Investments, one of Africas’s largest asset managers.