Foreign Policy

It’s a question richer people have about their poorer neighbors: Why are they poor? Is it circumstances, or is it some kind of moral or intellectual failing? Is it that they never had a chance to cross from the wrong side to the right side of the tracks, or that they never had the motivation to cross? The subject colors thinking about international development as well. Is poverty in Africa and Asia the result of something about individual Kenyans or Pakistanis, or is it instead something about Kenya or Pakistan? Is it about the people, or the place?

There’s a feel-good myth that governs much American punditry: that good policy and good politics go hand in hand. Often, sadly, it’s not true. Take President Obama and Afghanistan: On no other major issue has Obama been so cynical. And on no other issue has his cynicism proved so politically shrewd.

The strategic partnership agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that was signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai on May 1, 2012 did not address several critical questions, the most important of which is whether, and to what degree, the international community will continue to fund the Afghan government after 2014. Addressing the Afghan government’s budget needs is to be a major focus of the upcoming Chicago summit.

On this week's episode of The Sidebar podcast (available below) Leila Hilal discusses Egypt's first ever presidential debate and the emerging democratic process in the Middle East. Jeff Vanke talks about France's new president and the future of the Eurozone. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

Also, Leila Hilal spoke with us on camera to preview Egypt's upcoming elections:

It's the diplomatic equivalent of hosting both the World Cup and the World Series in the same country on the same weekend.

On Saturday President Obama welcomes the leaders of the world's most powerful countries to the G8 conference at his country retreat at Camp David in Maryland. And the next day he hosts some two dozen NATO heads of state in Chicago.

It’s the kind of thing that usually happens near the end of a campaign, when all hope is lost: Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy team is trashing him to the press. On Afghanistan, one adviser told David Sanger of The New York Times, “None of us could quite figure out what he was advocating.” Another acknowledged that when it comes to Iran, “I’m not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own.” A third admitted that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office.”

The meaning of Russian President Vladimir Putin's third term and updates on immigration policy and trends are topics for discussion in this week’s podcast.  Host Pamela Chan is joined by Schwartz Fellows Steve Levine and Tamar Jacoby.  

To learn more about today’s topics, check out:

Steve’s blog, The Oil and the Glory (http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/ ) and book, Putin's Labyrinth: Spies, Murder, and the Dark Heart of the New Russia (http://www.amazon.com/Putins-Labyrinth-Spies-Murder-Russia/dp/0812978412)

In a new book, a "60 Minutes" interview and other recent public statements, Jose Rodriguez, a three-decade veteran of the CIA who rose to become head of the National Clandestine Service, has stoutly defended the CIA's use of coercive interrogation techniques on al Qaeda detainees.

Rodriguez asserts, for instance, "Information obtained from senior al Qaeda terrorists, who became compliant after receiving enhanced interrogation techniques, was key to the U.S. government learning of the existence of a courier who was bin Laden's lifeline."

Listening to Barack Obama road-test his general-election stump speech this weekend in Virginia, I kept remembering the 2008 version and thinking that something was missing. Then it hit me: what’s missing this time is the rest of the world.

In Richmond this weekend, Obama described his 2008 campaign this way: “We came together to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth. We came together because we believe that in America, your success shouldn’t be determined by the circumstances of your birth.”