Morton Abramowitz

Barack Obama has said that the United States needs to send an extra 10,000 troops to Afghanistan. John McCain wants to send 15,000. But before ordering more soldiers into the fray, the next U.S. president should think about Afghanistan's history—and how such surges there have failed in the past.Three decades ago, the Soviet Union tried to subdue a fundamentalist Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan by deploying 108,000 troops (at the conflict's height in 1985–86), including special forces and...

Despite its achievements, Washington is divided on how to deal with North Korea long term.

This battle could last for months longer, and whether the AKP wins or loses, the consequences are bad.

The West must convey to the Serbian people what is at stake and the dangers of making the wrong choice.

If the Bush administration and Congress set out to deliberately undermine the Turkish government and its efforts to modernize the country, they couldn't have done a better job than they are doing already.

Since the war in Iraq began, more than 2 million Iraqis have become refugees in their own country, and some 2 million have dispersed abroad. This massive exodus has already become a huge humanitarian disaster, and the worst may be yet to come.

Turkey suffers a political crisis once a decade or so. The showdown now looming, however, may not end as such confrontations have in the past, with Islam in retreat.

Once again the Balkans are on the world docket. Few are paying attention, but the stakes are high: the stability of the region, the reliability of international promises, the credibility of the United Nations.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER RICHARD NIXON BEGAN THE "normalization" process with Mac Zedong, America's China policy has broken down. It's not hard to see why.

FOR A TIME, IT looked as though Albania had become America's favorite Balkan country. The Pentagon quickly cozied up to the military once the country abandoned communism--but has now run away just as fast.

IF JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE IS mentally unfit to rule, why has the U.S. government built its Haitian policy around him? If he isn't, why does the CIA keep telling the Congress that he is?

"The economy, stupid" may have been the catch phrase that won the election for Bill Clinton, but the new mantra is increasingly, "Hell . . . it's foreign policy again." In foreign affairs, George Bush is passing a messy hand to Clinton, who can't easily reshuffle the deck.

Morton Abramowitz is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey. The Bush administration is itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was U.S. ambassador to Thailand 1978-81. Military coups have been mostly a spectator sport in Thailand, much like sex scandals in the United States.