The U.S. State Department has jumped into the world of online communication with a vengeance. January 2012 has been designated 21st Century Statecraft month, and Administration officials have been busy tweeting, blogging, doing online Facebook chats, streaming video, and just about every other social media platform imaginable. As a public diplomacy tool, the Internet has become a heaven-sent gift for Foggy Bottom. Clearly, there is a very determined effort underway to upgrade the image of the State Department from a rather staid and slow-pokey bureaucracy to a hopping, hip, and …
Did the Obama Administration miss a golden opportunity in the summer of 2009 to support the demonstrations of the Iranian Green Movement and maybe even once and for all get rid of the toxic government of Iran? A lot of people around this town think so, and certainly so do a lot of Iranians who risked their lives with almost no support from the government of the United States. The Obama Administration, which has scrambled to keep up with unfolding events in the Arab Spring uprisings, is not usually one …
Recently, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that there may be no summit between NATO and the Russian Federation if no agreement on missile defense is reached. This is understandable: Moscow has so far refused all Western entreaties to sign a workable missile defense arrangement and threatened that the NATO–Russia summit may be cancelled. If so, the loss will be all the Kremlin’s. NATO should not feel under any pressure to finalize a missile defense agreement, as Moscow is only trying to constrain the development of the U.S. missile …
It’s been said before, but it must be repeated. Hispanics are not single-issue voters. Despite the narrative reinforced over and over by the Hispanic media and the Latino lobby, Hispanics are concerned about more than just immigration reform. This was recently confirmed in an ImpreMedia Latino Decisions tracking poll that revealed that the economy, not immigration, is the issue of most concern to Hispanics. Of course, you won’t hear too many of the President’s surrogates mentioning this latest poll, because it’s far easier to cast conservatives as anti-Hispanic for being …
On Wednesday, the United States took the most aggressive military action in Somalia since the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. Three months ago, two foreign aid workers were kidnapped by a band of Somali criminals. After failed ransom negotiations and as one of the American hostages, Jessica Buchanan, was suffering deteriorating health conditions, President Obama on January 23 authorized a daring rescue mission. It was carried out with brilliant efficiency by Navy SEAL Team Six. In the carefully orchestrated operation, the SEALs safely whisked Buchanan and her Danish colleague Poul …
Beneath the President’s bully pulpit in the House of Representatives last night must be a very thick carpet under which Barack Obama managed to sweep a great number of inconvenient facts and issues in the Americas. When it came to our Hemisphere, north and south, he told us not to worry. A single sentence sufficed to sweep every issue under the carpet: “Our ties to the Americas are deeper.” No need to worry about the Americas, right? Wrong! For starters, we ought to ask why the Obama Administration currently has …
In this week’s Heritage in Focus, Heritage director of communications, Rory Cooper, discusses the president’s State of the Union address. Click here to listen. What’s Heritage’s take on the State of the Union? What’s something Americans should have heard in the speech, but didn’t? What’s the best way to put our country on the right track? Make sure to listen to hear answers to these questions and more!
Those who might have nodded off after the first hour of President Obama’s third State of the Union address were surely brought back to consciousness by the startling claims on foreign policy and global leadership in the last third of the speech. As did much of the speech as a whole, it had a kind of Alice in Wonderland quality to it. “America is back,” proclaimed the President, who had just boasted of his ignominious troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. “Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you …
In listening to the State of the Union, you would never know that the U.S. still has close to 100,000 troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. While President Obama highlighted U.S. gains against al-Qaeda and the significance of the raid that eliminated Osama bin Laden last May, he downplayed the challenges that remain in Afghanistan. President Obama merely said he was “winding down the war,” giving the false impression that the U.S. can depart Afghanistan on an arbitrary timetable without any costs to its national security. This paints a misleading …
President Obama’s state of the union speech tonight mentioned Iran, which poses the greatest immediate challenge to American foreign policy, in only one paragraph. The president stated: “Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from …
