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Featured Publications
Kazakhstan and the United States: Twenty Years of Ambiguous Partnership
The Five Futures of Cyber Conflict and Cooperation
US Lessons for the Eurozone Restoring Confidence through Transparency
Prospects and Challenges for Increasing India-Pakistan Trade
A US-EU Action Plan for Supporting Democratization: Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia
Council News
Jonathan Paris Discusses Syrian Crisis with France 24
Jonathan Paris, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, appeared on France 24 to discuss Russia's support for the Assad regime and what it means for a possible UN resolution against Syria.
Damon Wilson US Senate Testimony: Ukraine at a Crossroads
On February 1, Atlantic Council executive vice president Damon Wilson testified at a hearing of the US Senate Committe on Foreign Relations on the topic: "Ukraine at a Crossroads: What's at Stake for the US and Europe?"
Michele Dunne on US-Egypt Relations for NPR's Morning Edition
Relations between the US and Egypt have taken a downturn since Egyptian authorities raided the offices of seventeen nongovernmental organizations in December - three of them US-funded. Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, spoke on NPR's Morning Edition about the situation and what it means for US aid to Egypt.
FEATURED ISSUE
The South Asia Center receives guidance and support from many experts throughout the world. Our senior fellows, guest-speakers, Center patrons, and visitors contribute heavily to the Center’s mission to “wage peace,” and engage the international community in the region. The Center asked our contributors the simple, but key question, “What you do expect in 2012?”
REGISTER
NATO Can Survive Afghanistan Failure
James Joyner | September 10, 2009
In my latest for The National Interest, I argue that, despite the constant urging otherwise by former Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO can survive failing in Afghanistan.
The piece is exclusive but here are two brief excerpts:
Quite naturally, citizens in free societies do not want to send their troops to fight and die unless the cause is just and the danger is enormous. This leads to the unfortunate tendency for democratic leaders to oversell war efforts—and undersell the dangers—to rally public support. Recall George H. W. Bush’s touting Saddam Hussein as “Hitler revisited,” Bill Clinton’s promise that American troops would remain in Bosnia no more than a year, or George W. Bush’s cherry-picking the intelligence on Saddam’s WMD and warning of “mushroom clouds.”
But:
[T]he fact of the matter is that NATO went to war in Afghanistan, invoking Article V’s declaration that an “attack against one” shall be “considered an attack against them all” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban government that sheltered al-Qaeda has been ousted and hundreds of the terrorist group’s leaders have been killed. The original mission has long since morphed into an incredibly ambitious nation-building exercise with murky goals.
NATO would never have achieved consensus on undertaking such a mission, even in the emotional wake of 9/11. Why, then, should its future rest on its achievement?
Much more at the link.
James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council.
