We are entering a novel period in our history–one in which the United States will be both fiscally constrained and also unable to call the shots in many places around the globe. Let me try to set the stage for your discussions by raising some difficult questions for you to ponder.

David Andrew Singer, associate professor of political science at MIT, discusses the future of the euro with Marco Mazzucchelli, visiting scholar, MIT Sloan.

The series Audit of the Conventional Wisdom continues with a look at the Obama administration's strategy towards Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South Asia. Paul Staniland, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT and a member of the Center's Security Studies Program is featured. In fall 2010, Staniland will join the University of Chicago as assistant professor of political science.

The Center's Audit of the Conventional Wisdom series continues with an analysis of the defense budget—the largest since World War II. Is it a rational response to the threats and the dangers that the United States faces—or not? Benjamin Friedman is a PhD student at the MIT Department of Political Science. He is a member of the Center's Security Studies Program and is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute.

The Center's Audits of the Conventional Wisdom series continues with Jim Walsh on Iran. Walsh is an international securities expert and research associate at the Center's Security Studies Program. 

Anat Biletski audits President Obama's speech in Cairo and Prime Minister Netanyahu's counter-speech in Israel. Anat Biletski is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. She is the former chair of B'Tselem and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for International Studies.

Over the course of the seemingly endless 2008 electoral campaign, Barack Obama chose not to formulate a coherent and distinctive foreign policy. Aside from calling for a redeployment of military resources from Iraq to Afghanistan and expressing a greater willingness to open talks with countries like Iran, he never explained to voters exactly how he would manage foreign affairs differently from John McCain or, for that matter, from George W. Bush. 

We are in the midst of a global financial crisis. The U.S. “sub-prime” crisis, which triggered some of the largest bank failures in U.S. history, has now spread in earnest to Europe and Asia. Bank failures around the globe are likely to continue as housing markets collapse and credit markets run dry.

There is a general consensus that the “surge” of additional troops into Iraq has been responsible for the significant decrease of violence in Iraq. Sen. John McCain has long advocated “sustained and substantial” troop increases, attacking Sen. Barack Obama’s position on drawing down forces. Obama for his part recently stated that the surge has “succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated” and “beyond our wildest dreams.”

The two trials that have been occupying the Turkish national agenda today are likely to be the milestones of Turkey’s ability to rid itself of an opaque regime shaped under bureaucratic tutelary. 

In Escape from Empire: The Developing World ’s Journey through Heaven and Hell (MIT Press, 2007), Alice Amsden tartly takes on much of the conventional wisdom about the global economy. In this interview, she briefly touches on a few of the book’s provocative themes.

Two myths have been with us for a while now; one is of lasting permanence, the other has gained traction more recently. The first is that the way to get out of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio is by engaging in a “peace process,” and the second is that the result of that peace process is pretty much well-known.

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In recent years, Woodrow Wilson has returned to feature prominently in the public discourse on the role of the United States in the world. For students of U.S. foreign relations, this is hardly a surprising development. Wilson was responsible for articulating a vision of the U.S. role in the world—usually described as “liberal internationalism”—that has remained, despite well-known flaws and scores of critics over the years, dominant in shaping American rhetoric and self-image, if not always policies, vis-à-vis the rest of the world. 

The first subject to discuss in considering the future of the liberal internationalist agenda is the importance of the democratization project to the definition of Wilsonianism. The second is the meaning of multilateralism. In the first case, Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter argue in a forthcoming volume that democratization was never an important part of Wilsonianism; that, instead, multilateralism is the key to liberal internationalism. 

All war situations are a little bit opaque, but from reading the Iraqi press in Arabic, I conclude that there are three major struggles for power of a political and violent sort. What's striking is how little relevant the United States is. 

As Vladimir Putin nears the end of his second term as Russian president, it is clear that energy exports have become a major component of a resurgent Russia’s foreign policy. According to the conventional wisdom, Russia’s vast resources make it a superpower to be reckoned with. 

The most terrifying security threat to security experts and the public alike is nuclear proliferation. Once the figment of Hollywood imagination, the ultimate nightmare scenario that is discussed by some as inevitable is the detonation of a nuclear device on American soil. 

U.S. China policy in the beginning of the twenty-first century is greater than the sum of diplomatic initiatives and presidential statements. Since China’s rise is reshaping global politics, U.S. policy should be evaluated in this larger context. Washington must not only handle its relationship with China on a day-to-day basis, but must also lay the foundations for a long-term response to its rise.

The debate over immigration reform in America has come full circle. It began in late 2005 with an “enforcement only” bill in the House of Representatives that relied on aggressive implementation of existing law and greatly restricting future immigration. The most extreme legislation proposed in this vein would have made felons of undocumented immigrants and prosecuted those who provide such immigrants with aid or comfort.

For decades, political analysts have dissected the mechanisms in the U.S. government and other institutions to describe how foreign policy is made. The matter seems to rise with international crises, and those are upon us again: the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the confrontation with Iran, HIV/AIDS, and the pressures of climate change, among other issues, underscore the point.

A bipartisan consensus wants to expand the American ground forces. But the expansion serves a failed strategy that relies on military occupations and state-building to fight terrorism. A better strategy is to avoid these missions and the troop expansion.

In January 2003, the Bush administration drew 22 disparate agencies and some 170,000 employees into a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Proponents of the reorganization hoped a single department under a single cabinet secretary would foster unity of effort across a substantial portion of the federal activities related to domestic security.   

China’s so-called rise to great power status is usually taken for granted. Still, a convincing argument can be made that Beijing’s post-Cold War grand strategy is based on fear of failure rather than management of success. 

There is a tendency in the outside world to see the tragedy in the Darfur region of the Sudan in isolation from the regional conflicts that have been proliferating in the country for a half century. These conflicts reflect an acute crisis of national identity that is both a cause of genocidal wars and a factor in the state’s indifference to the resulting humanitarian consequences.

In a laudable about-face, President Bush has decided at last to accept North Korea’s longstanding offer to suspend production of plutonium by shutting down and sealing its reactor and reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, halting construction of a larger reactor and not restarting a newly refurbished fuel fabrication plant.

President Bush is renewing his effort to create an Iraq that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and is throwing more resources at the project. The first priority must be governance, however, as administration and defense cannot happen without a functioning government.

It does not seem that long ago that optimism flowered about prospects for democracy and sustained economic development on a worldwide scale. But hopes for the future have dimmed over the last several years, as problems of violence, crime, and insecurity have emerged with a vengeance in many parts of the global south. 

This metaphor captures the challenges awaiting Abe Shinzo, Japan’s new prime minister very nicely—particularly in the areas of foreign and security policy. His predecessor, Koizumi Junichiro, had already been like Goldilocks in his extended effort to find just the right policy toward North Korea.

Much has been written and spoken about the US-India nuclear agreement since Prime Minster Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush unveiled it on July 18, 2005, in Washington, DC. Since then, the U.S. Congress has virtually set aside its much touted concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons and is nearly ready to approve the amendments to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act that will be necessary for the deal to be consummated.

Since al-Qaeda’s rise to prominence as the most commonly recognized Islamist group worldwide, Islamist movements are increasingly viewed as violent, transnational organizations. Most Islamist groups, however, are actually non-violent and focused on the domestic audience of their home countries. 

The attacks of September 11, 2001, transformed the landscape of global security, none more than borders and immigration. The topography of citizenship, belonging, and suspicion instantly changed for Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. They drew the sharp attention of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services, and that continues. 

Suicide terror has become a daily news staple. Who are these human bombs, and why are they willing to die in order to kill? Many observers turn to Islam for an explanation. They cite the preponderance of Muslim bombers today, indoctrination by extremist institutions, and the language used in jihadi statements.

The intense concern about Iran's nuclear energy program reflects the judgment that, should it turn to the production of weapons, an Iran with nuclear arms would gravely endanger the United States and the world. Indeed, while it's seldom a positive thing when a new nuclear power emerges, there is reason to believe that we could readily manage a nuclear Iran.

To gain insight into the future of the Sino-Japanese relationship, we need to clear up the misconceptions, misunderstandings, and errors that beset the two countries’ relations and take an intellectual scalpel to their source. Some of the errors are related to the way people think about or perceive themselves, while others stem from the thinking or attitudes of the other party; still others are linked to the history of Japan-China relations.

The surprise victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian Presidential election last June brings up the question of whether the reform movement is dead in Iran. Does Ahmadinejad’s success imply that Iranians have economic demands only? Who now are the supporters of reform?

Conventional wisdom says that none of us are safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are. The conventional belief is that in response to terrorism, the federal government has spent massive sums on homeland security. The fact is that the increased federal spending on homeland security since September 11 pales in comparison to increases in the U.S. defense budget. But homeland security has costs beyond spending, costs that conventional thinking rarely considers.

Iran is now an important focal point for U.S. foreign policy. Yet many have argued that the United States lacks a coherent foreign policy on Iran, amounting to no more than an enormous list of “evils”: namely, that Iran exports its radical Islamist revolution, supports Hezbollah and Hamas and actively opposes the Middle East peace process, is building nuclear and biological weapons capacity, was involved in the bombings of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires and the Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, provides Al-Qaeda with safe passage and refuge, helps insurgents in Iraq, assassinates its own dissidents and oppresses its people, and so on. 

In the United States, weapons of mass destruction have become the bête noir of the 21st century. They are now the justification for pre-emptive war, for an expansion of the cold war nuclear arsenal, and for the spending of billions of dollars on offensive and defensive measures. Since significant portions of U.S. foreign and domestic policy are based on this categorization, it is high time to reflect on whether these weapons pose such a lethal threat.

Some two years into the occupation in Iraq, the U.S. Army faces a serious staffing challenge. As of May 30, 2005, the active-duty Army had missed its recruiting goals for four months in a row. If things do not improve substantially, the service will have only 10 percent of needed enlistees pre-signed for basic training at the beginning of 2006; normally it begins the year with about one-third of its trainees already committed to contracts.

Canada and Mexico rarely figure high on the list of American priorities. Policymakers focus on conflicts in the Middle East; specialists in international relations discuss China’s growing influence; and newspapers cover the international crisis du jour. It is easy to forget about two countries that appear to pose no direct or immediate threat to U.S. interests.

The long history of U.S. foreign policy is punctuated by axiomatic truths that have bordered on conceit—e.g., the virtues of isolation, America’s manifest destiny, and our benign, democratizing presence in world affairs. Strategists have lurched from truth to truth across the centuries, often without sufficient reflection and learning. Today the United States is operating with an axiomatic idea about its place in and of Asia.