Foreign Affairs

When the White House reviewed U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in 2009, it opted for an adversarial decision-making process, with each camp fighting for its position. This time around, the administration has wisely chosen a process aimed at reaching a consensus -- a decision that should make executing the strategy easier.

Middle East experts were as surprised as everyone else by the Arab revolts. Focused on explaining the stability of local autocracies in recent decades, they underestimated the hidden forces driving change. As they wipe the egg off their faces, they need to reconsider long-held assumptions about the Arab world.

Why have the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya followed such different paths? Because of the countries' vastly different cultures and histories, writes the president of the American University in Cairo. Washington must come to grips with these variations if it hopes to shape the outcomes constructively. This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

Although last winter's peaceful popular uprisings damaged the jihadist brand, they also gave terrorist groups greater operational freedom. To prevent those groups from seizing the opportunities now open to them, Washington should keep the pressure on al Qaeda and work closely with any newly installed regimes.This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

The recent turmoil in the Middle East may lead to the Arab world's first sustained experiment in Islamist government. But the West need not fear. For all their anti-American rhetoric, today's mainstream Islamist groups tend to be pragmatic—and ready to compromise if necessary on ideology and foreign policy.

Not since the Suez crisis and the Nasser-fueled uprisings of the 1950s has the Middle East seen so much unrest. Understanding those earlier events can help the United States navigate the crisis today -- for just like Nasser, Iran and Syria will try to manipulate various local grievances into a unified anti-Western campaign.This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

Revolutions rarely succeed, writes one of the world's leading experts on the subject—except for revolutions against corrupt and personalist "sultanistic" regimes. This helps explain why Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak fell—and also why some other governments in the region will prove more resilient.

With China's clout growing, the international community needs to better understand China's strategic thinking. But China's core interests are to promote its sovereignty, security, and development simultaneously -- a difficult basis for devising a foreign policy.

Now that Mubarak has stepped down, the army may step in as a transitional power, recognizing that it must turn power over to the people quickly. More likely, however, is the return of the somewhat austere military authoritarianism of decades past. This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

Last week's mass protests in Tunisia were less a symptom of economic malaise than of a society fed up with its broken dictatorship. Should the other autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa be afraid? This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

Once again, a global movement is afoot to free the world of nuclear weapons. Unlike the Easter marches of the 1950s and 1960s or the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, however, this time around, the policy elites themselves are leading the charge. The list of supporters of Global Zero, the new campaign's flagship organization, reads like a Who's Who of international strategy: from Zbigniew Brzezinski and Lawrence Eagleburger to Strobe Talbott and Philip Zelikow, from Carl Bildt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher to Igor Ivanov and David Owen.

In April 2009, moreover, U.S. President Barack Obama aligned himself with the cause, declaring global disarmament a top priority. Two months later, Vice President Joe Biden stymied a Pentagon plan for a new generation of warheads as a threat to the administration's credibility. And the consensus runs from the White House to City Hall: last June, cheering "U.S. participation in [the] global elimination of nuclear weapons," the U.S. Conference of Mayors called on Congress to "terminate funding for modernization of the nuclear weapons complex."

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Since 2001, Afghanistan's economy has grown at an impressive rate and major development indicators in the country have improved dramatically. Even security and the rule of law—long neglected—are now improving. Washington and its allies could still win in Afghanistan if they are given the time they need.

As China's economic might expands, Beijing not only wants a greater stake in international organizations but also to remake the rules of the game.

On April 8, sitting beside each other in Prague Castle, U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). Just two days earlier, the Obama administration had issued its Nuclear Posture Review, only the third such comprehensive assessment of the United States' nuclear strategy. And in May, as a gesture of openness at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York, the U.S. government took the remarkable step of making public the size of its nuclear stockpile, which as of September 2009 totaled 5,113 warheads.

For proponents of eliminating nuclear weapons, these events elicited both a nod and a sigh. On the one hand, they represented renewed engagement by Washington and Moscow on arms control, a step toward, as the treaty put it, "the historic goal of freeing humanity from the nuclear threat." On the other hand, they stopped short of fundamentally changing the Cold War face of deterrence.

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Since 2001, the West has tried to build a strong centralized government in Afghanistan. But such an approach fits poorly with the country's history and political culture. The most realistic and acceptable alternative models of governance are decentralized democracy and a system of internal mixed sovereignty.

Current efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are based on a misunderstanding of the country's culture and social structure. As three new books show, defeating the Taliban will require local, bottom-up efforts—beginning with a deep understanding of tribal and subtribal politics.

By exposing them to the truth about their impoverishment and about the prosperity of their South Korean cousins, the United States can encourage North Koreans to change the regime in Pyongyang.

The Copenhagen conference won't solve the problem of climate change once and for all. Rather than aiming for a broad international treaty, negotiators should strengthen existing national policies and seek targeted emissions cuts in both rich nations and the developing world.

Driven by a near obsession with economic growth, Beijing has extended the state’s reach into the economy. Instead of urging the Chinese government to resume extensive market reforms, Washington should encourage it to focus on a narrow range of feasible measures.

The August war over South Ossetia has rekindled a superpower rivalry and showed the West that Moscow no longer heeds multilateral institutions.