The United States has dramatically increased the development, acquisition, and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). As these systems have grown, a chorus of skeptics has raised questions about the tactical, ethical, and strategic implications of this technology.

Abbas Maleki was in residence at CIS as a Robert E. WIlhelm Fellow. He is assistant professor of political science at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, director of the International Institute for Caspian Studies, and senior associate of the Belfer Center's International Security Program. He was Iran's deputy foreign minister from 1988–1997. 

Jackee Budesta Batanda was in residence at CIS as a Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. She is a Ugandan journalist, writer, and entrepreneur. She is a senior managing partner with Success Spark Brand Limited, a communications and educational company, and a co-founder of Mastermind Africa Group Limited, a business-networking group. 

The Center's series continues with a look at the recent discovery out of the Venter laboratory: artificial life. Is this a global good or evil? Ken Oye, director of the Center's Program on Emerging Technologies and associate professor of political science and engineering systems, discusses the discovery from his MIT office.

The Center's Audits of the Conventional Wisdom series continues with Fotini Christia on Afghanistan. Fotini is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at MIT.

Which is more likely in the next five years: that the Israelis and Palestinians negotiate a peace agreement or that they continue a “status quo” that turns into an accidental suicide pact? The safe bet is suicide. 

Colombia is one of the closest friends of American foreign policy. A country of 44 million, Colombia has been fighting for years against two scourges that have turned into primordial interests for the US: drug trafficking and terrorism.

Since the early 1990s, state-building has become an important objective of American foreign policy. This can be explained by the fact that failed states have been perceived since the end of the Cold War as a major security concern. Under the Clinton administration, failed states were qualified as major threats to global security. 

Afghanistan is one of several contexts in which the long-term common interests of the U.S. and Iran have been overshadowed by the animus originating in the 1953 CIA-led coup in Iran and the Iranian revolution of 1979, to the detriment of the interests of the U.S., Iran, and Afghanistan. 

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.”

Ever since Dmitri Medvedev’s nomination to succeed Vladimir Putin as president of Russia, followed by his election and now his inauguration, Kremlin watchers, both Russian and Western, have been discussing the so-called “Putin-Medvedev tandem” and asking who will really lead Russia. Is the duumvirate stable? Will it degenerate into squabbling among the Kremlin clans behind the scenes? 

After the kind of year that no country ever wants, with its government in crisis, repression replacing even the most remote notion of good government, political assassination, and terror standing in the wings, Pakistan elected a new parliament in February. Led initially by a coalition of three parties previously deemed outcasts by President Pervez Musharraf, its cabinet of familiar political faces quickly agreed in principle, and at least in public, on a compelling and daunting political agenda. 

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. 

The recent National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion that Tehran stopped its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, together with the significant drop in Iranian activity in Iraq, has created favorable conditions for the US to hold direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program. 

The release of the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities, intentions, and policies created shock waves as well as sighs of relief in Washington and elsewhere. The assessment that Iran stopped its weapons program in 2003, and that its declared enrichment program cannot be converted as easily or as quickly as assumed for use in a military program, immediately brought into question the notion that Iran’s nuclear program needs to be dealt with immediately and only through coercive mechanisms. 

During the Cold War years we learned that successful arms control agreements with the Soviet Union were those that codified parity, or at least a mutually acceptable status quo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) in 1991, a much diminished Russia saw all its WTO allies and three former Soviet republics join NATO, making parity harder to achieve. 

Several months ago, during the finalization of the plan to replace the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights with the new UN Human Rights Council, John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said with characteristic flourish, “We want a butterfly..."

A major natural gas pipeline that would stretch from the fields of southern Iran to Pakistan and India—itself a remarkable prospect—is being planned. But it faces serious hurdles, not least the fierce opposition of the U.S. government.

Japanese strategists struggled for decades to find a way to field a robust military despite legal, political, and normative constraints on the expansion of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Their progress was steady and significant, but slow. Now, leveraging off (and playing up) a perceived shift in the nature of the threat Japan faces, they have found a less constrained and highly efficacious route to force transformation. 

Do high levels of international trade lead to peace? Norman Angell authored the best-selling book on international politics in history, arguing that economic interdependence between Germany and England made any war between the two unthinkable—an illusion. 

Mass demonstrations in late April brought out hundreds of thousands of people in Ankara and perhaps a million people one week later in Istanbul, an awesome scene on both occasions. Demonstrations of lesser scale are underway in smaller cities like Canakkale and Manisa—a trend to continue until early elections scheduled for July 22. 

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.   

At least since the First World War, when the German army sabotaged the Allies’ pack animals with anthrax and glanders, worldwide concern about biological weapons has focused on how to improve legal restraints against biological weapons (BW). Over these same years, the major powers have vacillated in their willingness to promote international treaties and laws against BW programs. 

As observers outside of China warn of a looming Chinese end game in global energy assets, manipulated by Beijing, leading policymakers inside of China are facing considerable challenges governing major energy companies—especially those that the state owns. 

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.

In one way or another, we are headed for a new engagement with the regional players to in an effort end the Iraq war. The idea of bringing in the neighbors to help stabilize and reduce the violence in Iraq is very attractive, and could contribute to a plausible exit strategy for the United States. 

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.

President Bush recently likened the war on terror to the struggles Americans faced in World War II, explaining that our enemies are “successors to Fascists, to Nazis ... and other totalitarians of the 20th century.” The analogy to World War II is useful and illuminating. Important lessons from World War II apply to the war on terror.

The adoption of Security Council Resolution 1701 brought a halt to the month-long Israeli-Hezbollah war. UNIFIL will be greatly expanded with a more vigorous mandate to back Lebanese assertion of full sovereignty and control over southern Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah’s militia and missile sites. But is an agreement hammered out in Manhattan sustainable on the ground? 

Since September 2001, federal budgets for national security have climbed more than 50 percent in real terms. Unfortunately, much of the added money reflects “business as usual” rather than programs aimed at making the nation safer from today’s threats.

There has long been a widespread perception among U.S. defense intellectuals, politicians and pundits that, while we can live with the nuclear weapons of the five official nuclear nations for the indefinite future, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nuclear-threshold states in the Third World, especially the Islamic world, would be enormously dangerous. This orthodoxy is so much a part of our collective common sense that, like all common sense, it can usually be stated as simple fact without fear of contradiction.

Since the autumn of 2001, following the shocking attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his advisers have repeatedly likened the war against terrorism to the confrontation with Nazi Germany in the Second World War and the long struggle with Soviet communism in the Cold War. But the current anti-terrorist campaign and the related war in Iraq are significantly different from those earlier contests.

In recent years, the money that migrants send back to their native countries has become a hot topic in international development circles. Multilateral banks, the governments of migrant-sending nations, the U.S. Government, and international development organizations laud the potential that remittances have to reduce poverty and promote development. Remittances are being exalted as “the new development finance,” and a ticket to “high human development,” while the migrants who send them are hailed as heroes back home.

It is widely recognized that access by belligerent groups to the gains from drug production and trafficking contributes to the intensity and prolongation of military conflict. Also, that such groups—terrorists, insurgents, or warlords—grow stronger when they successfully exploit the drug trade. The United States’ response—its antinarcotics policy—emphasizes crop eradication.

It did not take long for blame for the September 11 attacks to cascade onto the intelligence community. But it is not deserved, and the reasons for that are important.

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. 

To most Americans, the prospect of a united Europe has long been viewed not only as a favorable development, but even as an increasingly inevitable one. Our common political, religious and cultural heritage, democratic governments, market economies, and Cold War experiences have all contributed to the perception of Europe as a friend and natural ally of the United States, occasional differences not withstanding.

A disturbing thing happened to me in Afghanistan last May while working on a project to install wells in villages. After a delightful month of working in a rural province, filled with welcoming leaders and offers of tea at every house, the mood suddenly changed. A young man walked up to my 42-year-old female American colleague and bashed her in the face. As we collected our interviewers and headed back to the vehicles, children from the village pelted us with stones. This violence against anything foreign played out in hundreds of locations across Afghanistan that day. 

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.

Two myths have important, distorting effects on the Bush administration's policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First is the optimistic belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a minor obstacle to American foreign policy—a modest hindrance that will not prevent the United States from achieving its main foreign policy goals. Second is the pessimistic belief that a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians is infeasible, so a forceful U.S. push for peace will only waste effort on a fool’s errand.