Editor's Note:  To restore the effectiveness of America’s multilateral diplomacy, writes William Burke-White, the United States must recognize and respond to a radically transformed geostrategic environment with a new approach to the multilateral architecture. This piece was originally published by Lawfare. In his first month in office, President Biden has taken important first steps “to begin restoring American engagement internationally and earn back our leadership position, to catalyze global action on shared challenges.” The new administration has rejoined the Paris Agreement, reengaged the World Health Organization, returned (as observers) to the U.N. Human Rights Council and reached an agreement with Russia on the…

What is America’s mission?” is a question that has been debated since George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1797. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, President Biden laid out his vision as to what is America’s mission. And the contrast with the mission enunciated by George W. Bush in his second inaugural could not have been more defining or dramatic. Here is Bush, Jan. 20, 2005: “From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and…

First published in 2005, updated in January 2015 and April 2017. The US opioid crisis broadly defined bears a relationship to the export of heroin out of Afghanistan. There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users). Author’s Note and Update Despite president Trump’s as well as Biden’s more recent announcement of US troop withdrawals, the Afghan opium trade continues to be protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of powerful financial  interests. Afghanistan’s opium economy is a multibillion dollar…

As the new administration reassesses U.S. nuclear policy, it will be forced to make decisions about the future of the country’s ground-based, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) arsenal. Many advocates of maintaining the nuclear status quo have argued that it is essential to completely replace America’s aging Minuteman ICBMs with a new set of missiles, commonly referred to as the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent. And yet, to justify this approach, advocates have falsely presented the decision as a binary choice. They claim the United States must either fully replace its ICBMs or jettison them entirely. There is, however, an alternative…

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - Former U.S. President Donald Trump tried threats of "fire and fury,” followed by personal letters and made-for-TV summits to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons.  As U.S. President Joe Biden now maps out his own strategy for North Korea, many former U.S. officials want the White House to base its approach on a less flashy but in some ways even more provocative idea: that North Korea has no plans to abandon the nuclear program it spent decades building. The United States has long demanded the complete denuclearization of North…