Bernie Sanders may have had no foreign policy advisers until this week, but he can justly claim to have proposed one of the boldest and radical foreign policy ideas of the 2016 presidential campaign. In what he describes as the most important speech of his campaign—on Democratic Socialism at Georgetown University in November 2015—Sanders called on the United States to fight terrorism in the same way it waged the Cold War. He said: “We must create an organization like NATO to confront the security threats of the 21st century” and we must “expand our coalition to include Russia and members of the Arab League.”

NATO was created in 1949 to give the United States a way to forward-deploy its forces so they would immediately be entangled in a war if the Soviets attacked Western Europe. The most important feature of NATO was the mutual defense clause, whereby an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. In a new NATO to fight terrorism, the United States could find itself having to deploy tens of thousands of troops throughout the Middle East to fight ISIS. The United States may even be treaty-bound to use its troops to fight alongside Russia in Chechnya. 

If that sounds very unlike Bernie Sanders, it's because it is. It is clear from the speech that Sanders had very little idea what NATO actually is or why it was founded. He was looking for a way to pass the burden of fighting terrorism on to other nations, particularly Muslim nations. Lacking any clear idea as to how to do this, a formal treaty must have seemed as good a way as any. Sanders would surely say that he meant an alliance without a mutual defense pact and without the United States taking the lead. But such an organization currently exists—it is called the counter-ISIS coalition. Presidents Bush and Obama also both sought ways to deepen cooperation with Russia and Arab countries on terrorism without a formal NATO-style alliance, which led to the situation Sanders decries. In any event, the new NATO served its purpose. Sanders could later claim to have given a speech on foreign policy. The specifics of the idea went un-scrutinized. 

Mind the gap

Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy remains a mystery because he has said so little about it. Unlike Donald Trump, who has been vocal about his foreign policy views for many decades, Sanders has focused his message on inequality and the nefarious influence of big money in politics. Recently though, he has begun to come out of his shell. He regularly invokes his opposition to the Iraq War in an effort to negate Hillary Clinton’s superior experience in foreign policy. Sanders clearly hopes that this vote will enable him to win over many Barack Obama supporters who remain suspicious of Clinton. In recent weeks, some foreign policy experts have sketched out how Sanders could build on Obama’s foreign policy legacy and distinguish himself from Clinton. 

Sanders-Obama is the real foreign policy fault-line in the Democratic Party.

The conventional wisdom of the foreign policy debate in the Democratic Party sees an Obama wing that is skeptical of military intervention and a Clinton wing that is more willing to use American power overseas. This is a paradigm that Sanders would certainly endorse and hope to capitalize on but it is not an apt description of the 2016 divide. There is a reason why Obama has come close to endorsing Clinton and has left no doubt that he sees her as his true heir. The gap between Sanders and Obama is much greater than between Clinton and Obama. Obama is an avowed globalist who looked outward, even as he was campaigning in Iowa in 2007. Sanders is a liberal nationalist who looks inward, not just in his rhetoric but in his policy. 

A Sanders nomination would be a striking repudiation not just of Clinton but of Obama’s worldview and message. Sanders-Obama is the real foreign policy fault-line in the Democratic Party. 

Obama 2008: Looking outward

Obama’s 2008 campaign is now shrouded in mythology. He is often described as unlikely a candidate as Sanders. Forgotten is the fact that weeks after he started, he secured the support of major donors and dozens of foreign policy experts. He was always the favorite of a particular part of the establishment. He was young but he had thought about the world and America’s role in it. In 2005, he hired Samantha Power to be his foreign policy adviser in the Senate. His 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope" had a chapter on foreign policy that culled ideas from think tank row. 

In April 2007, a full 18 months before the election, Obama gave a revealing interview to The New York Times' David Brooks in which he spoke about the influence that American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had on his foreign policy. Niebuhr was a seminal figure in U.S. diplomatic thinking during the Cold War and is credited with developing the most sophisticated critique of American idealism. Obama said that Niebuhr provided:

“the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away...the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

Some of these themes would reappear in his extraordinary speech in Oslo in 2010 on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama spoke about reviving American leadership and presenting a new face to the world. In his announcement speech in Springfield in 2007, Obama said “ultimate victory against our enemies will come only by rebuilding our alliances and exporting those ideals that bring hope and opportunity to millions around the globe.” In his acceptance speech in Chicago, he spoke to “those watching tonight from beyond our shores”. “Our stories are singular,” he said, “but our destiny is shared and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” 

Obama’s challenge in office, and the challenge of progressives after the Iraq War, was to develop a foreign policy that remained faithful to his internationalist ideals while resisting calls for large-scale military interventions. In this, his record was mixed. The Middle East stands out as a major failure but he had successes elsewhere. He helped rescue the international financial system, he deepened U.S. engagement in Asia, he negotiated several trade deals, and he secured a controversial nuclear deal with Iran. Throughout, he articulated a case for a liberal brand of American exceptionalism and for continued U.S. global leadership. 

Sanders 2016: Drawing inward

That is now at risk, not just by the prospect of a Trump presidency but also from within the Democratic primary. Sanders has had remarkable success with a campaign message that is entirely inwardly focused. Read his speeches, whether at Georgetown or on the stump, and you will see a sharp change of tone from Obama of 2008. Gone are the passages on a new era of American global leadership. Gone are the messages for people beyond these shores. Gone is the optimism about America’s global role. Gone too is the sense that the United States, flawed as it is, has a positive and indispensable role to play in upholding the international order. 

Rhetorically, Sanders is deeply pessimistic about the United States and its role in the world. For Sanders, America is not getting better—it’s getting worse, including on Obama’s watch. And, woe betide those who think that America can be any more successful abroad. In his Georgetown speech, he said that the first element of his foreign policy would be an acknowledgement of how America gets it wrong so frequently. In addition to the Iraq War, he mentioned the toppling of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, of Goulart in Brazil in 1964, and of Allende in Chile in 1973. 

[Sanders] offered no examples of how the United States has made the world a better place.

Apart from the ham-fisted description of NATO, he offered no examples of how the United States has made the world a better place. The toppling of foreign leaders is not, for him, even partially balanced out by successes in promoting democracy in Chile in 1987 or in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, or in Indonesia in 1998. He did not mention the Kosovo intervention in 1999, which he actually supported at the time. The speech was not without irony however. Sanders organized the domestic section, on democratic socialism, around Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union speech but made no mention of FDR’s heroic—and frequently risky—efforts to win the war and the post-war world.

As the campaign has progressed, Sanders has been pressed on what he would do if he were to be elected president. He said in a February Democratic debate that the “key doctrine of the Sanders administration would be no, we cannot continue to do it alone, we need to work in coalition.” The very idea that a Democratic candidate could make the unilateralist charge against Obama, one of the most multilateral presidents in modern American history, is itself remarkable and rather implausible. 

The very idea that a Democratic candidate could make the unilateralist charge against Obama, one of the most multilateral presidents in modern American history, is itself remarkable and rather implausible.

But this has not deterred Sanders. He has repeatedly argued that the Obama administration has not done enough to get Muslim nations to fight ISIS. At Georgetown he declared, “We need a commitment from these [Muslim] countries that the fight against ISIS takes precedence over the religious and ideological differences that hamper the kind of cooperation we desperately need.” Quite how Sanders would accomplish this was left unsaid. The reason ISIS is difficult to defeat is because Muslim nations see other challenges, particularly the sectarian struggle with Iran, as a much greater threat to their vital interests. 

Simply saying that the president can will other countries to act contrary to what they see as their vital interests is about as plausible as Trump persuading Mexico to pay for his wall. Clinton has repeatedly recognized the challenges associated with persuading Muslim countries to take on more of the anti-ISIS fight, but Sanders has just doubled down on his charge against Obama. “I’ll be dammed,” he told CNN, “if the kids of Vermont have to defend the Royal Saudi family” and take the lead in the fight against ISIS, even if is just with air power. 

On economic policy, Sanders offers an even more radical departure from Obama’s legacy. Sanders has opposed all U.S. trade agreements throughout his political career, including General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In 2005, he sponsored a bill calling on the United States to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. He has called for tariffs to prevent American industry from investing in China, Vietnam, and Mexico. He was the only Democrat to vote against the Import-Export Bank and he opposed the expansion of the H1-B visa program for high-skilled workers. 

He has offered no positive vision for the world economy and sees it as a zero sum game—either American workers’ win or other nations do. Obama indulged in anti-trade rhetoric, as has Clinton, in the heat of a primary campaign, but Sanders is different. He has consistently sought to disengage from the global economy—the same one that Obama did so much to save in 2009. This is no small matter. As the global economy flirts with recession and a new crisis, this time originating in China, the rest of the world is asking if America can continue to lead or if it is all tapped out. 

He has consistently sought to disengage from the global economy.

A President Sanders would not try to destroy America’s alliances like Donald Trump or leave the Middle East entirely like Rand Paul. But, he would surely try to hide from the world and tend to matters at home. He will be immediately tested by allies and adversaries alike as they try to find the limits of his commitments. All presidents are tested of course—especially those, including Obama and Clinton, who promise to focus on the home front— but they usually try to respond in a resolute way to dispel the concerns. Obama sent additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009, for example. Sanders will probably resist the pressure and focus on his domestic agenda, thus exacerbating foreign crises. He would surely feel a sense of betrayal as America’s allies failed to take up what he considered to be a fair share of the burden. 

America in the world?

2016 is a very different world than 2008. Then, Obama and Democrats saw a world that was full of opportunity, despite the financial crisis and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They believed the United States could offer a new face, and a new form of leadership, to the world. When we look back on 2016, it will surely be the year when the United States and much of the rest of the world faced a choice about whether to look outward or turn inward. It is not just the Republican and Democratic primary. Britain will vote on June 23 whether to leave the European Union. Germany and much of the rest of Europe will decide whether to close its borders to refugees.

When we look back on 2016, it will surely be the year when the United States and much of the rest of the world faced a choice about whether to look outward or turn inward.

Of all these tests, the biggest by far is in the United States. Republican and Democratic foreign policy populism is different, of course. Trump and his supporters are both terrified by threats from overseas and determined to lash out as viciously as possible against anything and everything associated with them. To his great credit, Sanders has not peddled fear of the other. His supporters are not frightened by the world. But they are disappointed in it and largely agnostic about what happens outside the United States. The left used to be inherently internationalist, but today Sanders sees no opportunity to lead, only risks of becoming embroiled in someone else’s problems. Sanders will not tear down the liberal international order but he does want to avoid doing much to uphold it. 

Sanders, his aspiring advisers, and much of the media have an interest in situating his foreign policy worldview within the Obama-Clinton paradigm but it is simply not consistent with what he is saying or with what he has done in the very recent past (never mind decades ago). Obama and Clinton obviously differ on some elements on U.S. foreign policy. It is not about large-scale invasions, as is commonly thought. Clinton is not about to send tens of thousands of ground troops to Syria. Rather, she tends to favor small-scale action early on in a conflict to tip the balance while Obama is extremely cautious about a slippery slope. Clinton also tends to see world politics more in terms of power politics while Obama often speaks as if we are headed toward a post-national, more global system. But this all pales in comparison to fundamental questions about whether the United States ought to be engaged in the world, not just militarily but also economically. Obama was elected on a platform of renewing American leadership in the world. He will soon find out if Democrats want to stay on the broad path he set.

In the summer of 1978, my grandfather George Washington Timmons, my cousin George, and I took the train from the Midwest across Canada and the ferry up the Pacific coast to Alaska. There we met up with my brother Steve, who was living in Anchorage. It was the trip of a lifetime: hiking, and fishing for grayling, salmon and halibut in Denali park, on the Kenai peninsula, Glacier Bay, and above the Arctic Circle in a frontier town called Fort Yukon, camping everywhere, and cooking on the back gate of my brother’s pickup truck. 

That Gramps had a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and a gruff demeanor gave the adventure a “Rough Riders” flavor. Like Teddy, the almost-indomitable GWT had given me a view of how experiencing a majestic land was a crucial part of becoming a robust American man. When we got home, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died just a few months later.

We project all kinds of cultural images and values on the green screen of the American landscape. Those endless late June sunsets in the Crazy Mountains and the sun on the ragged peaks of the Wrangell Mountains represent for me a sense of the vastness of the state of Alaska and the need to balance preservation there with the needs of its people for resources and income. Certainly there is enough space in Alaska to drill for oil and protect large swaths in wildlife refuges and national parks. As leaders of the Inupiat Eskimo corporation put it in a letter to Obama, “History has shown us that the responsible energy development, which is the lifeblood of our economy, can exist in tandem with and significantly enhance our traditional way of life.”

Unfortunately, this view is outdated: that was the case in Alaska, but there is a new, global problem that changes the calculus. As President Obama wraps up his historic visit to Alaska and meeting with the Arctic climate resilience summit (GLACIER Conference), he is walking a razor’s edge, delivering a delicately crafted missive for two audiences. Each view is coherent by itself, but together they create a contradictory message that reflects the cognitive dissonance of this administration on climate change.

For the majority of Alaska and for businesses and more conservative audiences, Obama is proclaiming that Alaskan resources are part of our energy future. With oil providing 90 percent of state government revenues, that’s the message many Alaskans most ardently want to hear.

For environmentalists and to the nations of the world, Obama is making another argument. His stops were chosen to provide compelling visual evidence now written across Alaska’s landscape that climate change is real, it is here, Alaskans are already suffering, and we must act aggressively to address it. “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now … We’re not acting fast enough.”

This is a razor’s edge to walk: the Obama administration is criticized by both sides for favoring the other. Those favoring development of “all of the above” energy sources say that Obama’s Clean Power Plan has restricted coal use in America and that future stages will make fossil fuel development even tougher in future years.  These critics believe Obama is driving up energy costs and hurting America’s economic development, even as oil prices drop to their lowest prices in years.

“Climate hawks” on the other hand worry that we are already venturing into perilous territory in dumping gigatons of carbon dioxide and other gases causing the greenhouse effect into the atmosphere. The scientific consensus has shown for a decade that raising global concentrations of CO2 over 450 parts per million would send us over 3.6 degrees F of warming (2 degrees C) and into “dangerous climate change.” The arctic is warming twice as fast as this global average, and though we are still below 1.8 degrees F of warming, many systems may be reaching tipping points already.

Already melting permafrost in Alaska releases the potent greenhouse gas methane, and wreaks havoc for communities adapted to that cold. Foundations collapse and roads can sink and crumble. The melting of offshore ice makes coastal communities more vulnerable to coastal erosion, and allows sunbeams to warm the darker water below, leading to further warming.

The difficulty is that we have a limit to how much greenhouse gases we can pump into the atmosphere before we surpass the “carbon budget” and push the system over 3.6 degrees F. Which fossil reserves can be exploited and how much of which ones must be kept in the ground if we are to stay within that budget? Realistic and credible plans have to be advanced to limit extraction and combustion of fossil fuels until we have legitimate means of capturing and sequestering all that surplus carbon somewhere safe. It is a dubious and risky proposition to say that we can continue to expand production here in America, and that only other countries and regions should cap their extraction.

Obama got elected partly due to his not rejecting natural gas and even coal development. He kept quiet about climate change during his entire first term and he and Mitt Romney had a virtual compact of silence on the issue during the 2012 campaign. But in his second term, Obama has become a global leader on the issue, seeking to inspire other countries to make and keep commitments to sharply reduce emissions. This work has yielded fruit, with major joint announcements with China last November, with Mexico in March, and a series of other nations coming in with pledges. The administration has been seeking to push the pledging process to keep our global total emissions below 3.6 degrees F.

However a just-released UNEP report shows that all the pledges so far—representing 60 percent of all global emissions—add up to 4-8 gigatons of carbon reduction in what would have been emitted. That’s progress, but the report goes on to show that we are still 14 gigatons short of where we need to be to stay under 3.6 degrees F. Indeed, Climateactiontracker.org reports that we are still headed to 5.5 degrees F of warming (3.1 C) with these pledges, down from 7 degrees without the pledges.

This puts the administration and U.N. officials in the position of having to decide which message to put out there—the hopeful message that emissions are being reduced, or the more frustrating one that they are not being reduced nearly enough. Environmentalists are in a similar position with Obama in Alaska—do they criticize him for allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic, or praise him for being generally constructive in this year’s effort to reach a meaningful treaty in Paris in December? Is it possible to kiss Obama on one cheek while slapping him on the other?

This is the delicate political moment in which we find ourselves. Fossil fuel projects continue to be built that will lock us in to carbon emissions for decades to come. They will certainly push us over the “carbon budget” we know exists and beyond which human civilization may be untenable on this planet. But these projects are advanced by extremely strong economic actors with mighty lobbying and public relations machines, and flatly opposing them is likely to lead to one’s portrayal as a Luddite seeking to send humanity back to the stone age. Clean energy alternatives exist, and they are increasingly affordable and reliable. Logically, we need to be spending the remaining carbon budget to make the transition to a net zero emissions economy, not to continuing the wasteful one we have now.

Players on both sides of this debate will seek to deploy Alaska’s majestic landscape to win their case. I’m fairly sure on which side my grandfather George Washington Timmons would have stood: he was a building contractor and would sometimes estimate the number of 2x4s one could harvest from a giant tree. But he didn’t know about the global carbon budget—he loved his children and grandchildren, and I think he would have supported living within our means if he was fully aware of this problem. The original Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt himself went from avid hunter to devoted conservationist as he learned of the damage over-cutting was causing American forests. As Obama said in Alaska, “Let’s be honest; there’s always been an argument against taking action … We don’t want our lifestyles disrupted. The irony, of course, is that few things will disrupt our lives as profoundly as climate change.”

That is the political razor’s edge the president—and all of us—have to walk today, as we make the inevitable transition away from fossil fuel development.

Ruy Teixeira joins NPR's Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan to discuss the Pennsylvania primary and the working-class vote.

NEAL CONAN: With us here in Studio 3A is Ruy Teixeira, a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution, co-author of the report "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class." He's kind enough to be with us here. Thanks very much for coming in, nice to see you again.

RUY TEIXEIRA: Great to be here.

NEAL CONAN: And, what are some of the common themes that we see around these working class voters that Sherry Linkon was talking to us about?

RUY TEIXEIRA: Well, I think Sherry touched on a number of them. I think one critical theme, obviously, for this election is their level of economic discontent and their sense that the economic ground has shifted underneath their feet, and they are sort of wondering where they are going to go in the future, where their kids are going to go, sort of, where their way of life is going to go.

This is a matter of great concern to these voters because the last, you know, actually the last several years, have not been kind to them. But more broadly, you can look back, you know, 35 years and say the last 35 years has not been very kind to them. This has been a period when America, by and large, has grown not as fast as it did and incomes have not risen as fast as they used to, but it's been particularly bad for these voters.

Anyone with less than a four-year college degree has really done rather poorly since about the middle 1970s. So, there's a real question in their minds of what America has in store for them in the future. And they are very interested to hear what politicians have to say about it. So far, it hasn't seemed to work out quite so well.

And the other side of it is really touched on by the controversy that you're referring to which is their sense of cultural traditionalism, their sense that, especially the Democrats, perhaps, seem out of touch with that at times. It seems like they don't respect their way of life. It seems like their social liberalism gets in the way of connecting to these voters and really hearing what they have to say and what their commitments and priorities really are and a sense of elitism on their part.

And that's really what, I think, Obama's getting slammed on this, you know, in general, and of course, obviously the McCain and Clinton campaigns have some interest in pushing this, but it did give them an opening to raise this issue and argue that, in fact, he is elitist. And Democrats, if they wish to get away from this, they have to adopt - I think it's a little bit unfair to the remark once you look at it in context.

But nevertheless, the perception was there particularly, I think the stuff about guns and about religion. I mean, can't you, like, own a gun and go to church and not be clinging to it? Because you know, your economic way of life is deteriorating. Again, I don't think that's what he meant. But that's how it's being interpreted. And that's where the discussion is.

Listen to the entire interview »

Updated, 11/14/14 with new content.

President Obama is traveling this week in the Asia-Pacific region. He is attending the APEC Summit in Beijing Monday and Tuesday; the ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit in Myanmar Tuesday; and the G-20 Summit in Brisbane Saturday and Sunday. Brookings experts have offered significant commentary on the president's agenda and challenges during this trip:

Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and the Michael H. Armacost Chair, reflects on what Presidents Obama and Xi said about the situation in Hong Kong during their summit.

Charles Freeman, a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center, reflects on Chinese President Xi's address to business executives during APEC during which Xi discussed the "new normal" of Chinese economic growth and more open visa policies. His remarks, Freeman notes, "sounded a contrasting note to those he made just a month earlier" and "were also out of tune with the well-chronicled anxieties of foreign investors about the souring business environment they face in China."

Neil Ruiz, a senior policy analyst and associate fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, says that the new visa rules agreed to by Presidents Obama and Xi "is an important step in building economic bridges between Chinese cities and U.S. metropolitan areas."

Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon, the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair in International Security, focuses on two prospective agreements on military matters, dealing with confidence-building and operational safety issues, reached between the U.S. and China. "The Obama and Xi teams should be proud of a good summit," writes O'Hanlon, "But situating these accords in a broader framework underscores how much work remains to be done."

On the U.S.-China climate agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions: Brookings Managing Director William Antholis calls it "dramatic" for both diplomatic and domestic political reasons; and Fellow Tim Boersma, acting director of the Energy Security Initiative, says it is "a big deal."

Miriam Sapiro, a visiting fellow and former deputy U.S. trade representative, says that the trip "gives the White House the chance to emphasize foreign and economic policy goals that can be broadly embraced by Democrats and Republicans." Sapiro also commented on the importance of trade policy, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in a recent Brookings Cafeteria podcast.

Experts recently joined together in a full-day conference to examine the economic, environmental, political, and security implications of President Obama's trip to China and his interactions with President Xi Jinping. Full audio, video, and a transcript of remarks by former U.S. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon are available.

Six experts from the John L. Thornton China Center recently offered their views on how President Obama can have a productive visit with President Xi. Their comments covered issues including Hong Kong, trade, and domestic Chinese reforms, among others.

Lynn Kuok, a nonresident fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, offers her perspectives on Obama's trip to Myanmar. 

In Think Tank 20, experts from Brookings and around the world address interrelated debates about growth, convergence, and income distribution—three elements likely to shape policy debates beyond the G-20 Summit. Use the handy globe interactive to navigate to countries and regions.

Kemal Derviş—vice president and director of Global Economy and Development and the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar—and Peter Drysdale—emeritus professor of economics at Australian National University—are the editors of a new volume on the G-20 summit at five years. They explore questions including, Will these summits add ongoing value to global economic governance, or will they will become purely ceremonial gatherings, which continue to take place because of the inertia in such processes?

In advance of President Obama’s trip to East Africa on July 23, the Africa Growth Initiative has prepared short travel companions on the economic environments in both Ethiopia and Kenya. The president’s visit to Kenya, one of the larger economies on the continent and a major driver of growth in the East Africa region, underlies the United States’ commitment to trade and investment on the continent. Below are key facts on Kenya’s economy to consider as President Obama travels to the region. Facts on Ethiopia can be found here.

Kenya enjoys middle-income status. Earlier this month the World Bank confirmed Kenya’s lower-middle-income country status according to their latest estimates of the gross national income per capita. This followed from the statistical reassessment of GDP figures that increased the size of its economy by 25 percent  ($53.3 billion up from $42.6 billion) last September, making it the continent’s ninth-biggest economy, accounting for over 2 percent of the continent’s GDP.

Kenya has undertaken initiatives to attract private sector investment. According to the late Brookings Senior Fellow Mwangi Kimenyi, the nation’s strong private sector evolved under relatively market-friendly policies for most of the post-independence era. Foreign direct investment is further expected to take the lead in growth acceleration, especially in the extractive sector if the newly discovered oil deposits are found to be commercially viable. Large-scale infrastructure projects, such as the Mombasa-Kigali standard-gauge railway and the Lamu Port and Southern Sudan and Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor, also incentivize private sector engagement. Kenya has been among the top recipients of external financing for infrastructure investment during 2009-2012, primarily led by Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) Financing.

Kenya was the first African country to build geothermal energy sources. Geothermal energy provides 51 percent of Kenya’s energy, allowing electricity bills to decrease by 30 percent since 2014 (World Bank).

Kenya acts as a hub for regional integration and the East African Community (EAC). Among the six Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) indicators of the African Development Bank, infrastructure and regional integration registered the score of 4.6 in Kenya, the second best in Africa. As a regional export and financial hub, Kenya plays a leading role in the EAC and regional integration. Two Kenyan cities, Nairobi and Mombasa, are the biggest city and port (respectively) between Cairo and Johannesburg, making Kenya the commercial and transportation hub of East Africa.

Kenya has experienced service-led growth over the last decade. Kenya’s market-based economy enjoys some of the strongest service-sector industries, including the financial and the information and communication technology sectors, which play key roles in economic transformation and job creation in Kenya. Besides, travel and tourism made up 12.1 percent of Kenya’s GDP in 2013, and the nation is frequently cited as one of the best tourist destinations in Africa.

More than two-thirds of the adult population engages in mobile commerce, making Kenya the world leader in mobile payments. At 86 percent mobile payments penetration among Kenyan households, M-Pesa is redefining the way Kenyans perform transactions and has also facilitated financial inclusion by promoting savings and financial transactions among the unbanked.

Nearly one out of every two women in Kenya is a member of a women’s saving group, which are voluntary groups formed to  help women overcome barriers to financial participation. Called chamas, these groups allow women to mobilize savings and collectively invest to improve their livelihoods by contributing a certain amount of money to a pooled fund.

Kenya has a thriving manufacturing sector. Kenya is slowly diversifying exports away from agricultural commodities and increasing value-added processing. In 2014, roughly 70 percent of Kenya’s exports to the U.S. were textile- and garment-based, in which the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has played a key role. The recent extension of AGOA for another decade opens up further opportunities for growth and revival of the textile and apparel industry in Kenya.

Kenya’s well-diversified economy and sound economic reform program are important steps in its quest to reach emerging market status. However, the following key challenges could undermine economic development:

Youth in Kenya are experiencing much higher unemployment rates than the rest of the Kenyan population. Though Kenya boasts of its young, educated and English-speaking human resource pool (especially in the urban areas), it continues to struggle with high unemployment rate among young people, which is estimated to be double the national level of unemployment of 12.7.

Spatially unbalanced growth in the Kenyan economy continues to be evident. Kenya has made substantial progress towards achieving towards achieving the targets associated with the Millennium Development Goals, including child mortality and near universal primary school enrolment. However, it still has a long way to reach the set targets: Over 40 percent of its 44 million population continues to be extremely poor living on less than $1.25 a day, with women being particularly at risk.

Implementation challenges of fiscal decentralization remain. Under the new constitution, county governments are entitled to not less than 15 percent of the total national revenue collected by the Kenyan central government. This fiscal devolution can bolster social cohesion, by increasing accountability in the management of public resources, and improving the quality of services delivery. However, it is crucial that this devolution is implemented successfully with equitable access to resources to all parts of the country. AGI’s Kenya Devolution and Revenue Sharing Calculator serves as a web interactive allowing users to explore and adjust the government of Kenya’s allocation formula for revenue distribution to county governance structures.

Kenya’s infrastructure remains insufficiently developed in spite of the fact that over the last five years, nearly 27 percent of the national budget has been allocated to transport, energy, water and sanitation, and environment-related infrastructure. Kenya was a pioneer in the use of infrastructure bonds in Africa, with its first issuance in 2009 of a 12-year bond which raised $ 232.6 million but further substantial investment in infrastructure is critical to achieving  Kenya Vision 2030 to become a globally competitive country.

Ryan’s EITC is pro-mobility… but funding it may not be

Paul Ryan seems to be thinking seriously about the issues of poverty and social mobility. He is a reformer as well as an authentic conservative.

While his willingness to embrace EITC expansion is welcome, his proposed funding methods raise serious questions. Paying for anti-poverty programs by cutting anti-poverty programs runs the risk of being self-defeating. No doubt some of them are not working as intended. But reform is the answer, rather than abolition. Many of these programs help those in the deepest poverty - who in many cases are those least likely to benefit from welfare-to-work policies such as the EITC, according to recent research from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and from the National Poverty Center. 

Ryan's package is worthy of serious attention, not least from the perspective of social mobility. It is important, however, not to consider the impact of the EITC expansion alone, but also how - and by whom- it will be paid for. 

Nearly eight years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains far from stable. As President Barack Obama considers alternatives to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, his administration’s new counternarcotics strategy meshes well with counterinsurgency and state-building efforts in the country. It is a welcome break from previous ineffective and counterproductive policies. The effectiveness of the policy with respect to counternarcotics, counterinsurgency and state-building, however, will depend on the operationalization of the strategy. The details are not yet clear, but the strategy potentially faces many pitfalls.

Efforts to bankrupt the Taliban through eradication are futile and counterproductive since they cement the bonds between the population and the Taliban. But interdiction is very unlikely to bankrupt the Taliban either. Security needs to come first before any counternarcotics policy has a chance of being effective. Counterinsurgent forces can prevail against the Taliban, without shutting down the Taliban drug income, by adopting an appropriate strategy that provides security and rule of law to the population and by sufficiently beefing up their own resources vis-à-vis the Taliban. Rural development is a long term and multifaceted effort. Simplistic strategies that focus simply on price ratios or try to raise risk through “seed-burn-seed” approaches are ineffective. Wheat replacement strategy as a core of the alternative livelihoods effort is singularly inappropriate for Afghanistan. Shortcuts do not lead to sustainable policies that also mitigate conflict and enhance state-building.

The Obama administration will need to reduce expectations for quick fixes and present realistic timelines to Congress, the U.S. public and the international community for how long rural development and other counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan will take to show meaningful and sustainable progress that advances human security of the Afghan people, mitigates conflict and enhance state building. Unless this is conveyed, there is a real danger that even a well-designed counternarcotics policy will be prematurely and unfortunately discarded as ineffective.

The New Strategy in Afghanistan’s Context

In summer 2009, the Obama administration unveiled the outlines of a new counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. The new policy represents a courageous break with previous misguided efforts there and thirty years of U.S. counternarcotics policies around the world. Instead of emphasizing premature eradication of poppy crops, the new policy centers on increased interdiction and rural development. This approach strongly enhances the new counterinsurgency policy focus on providing security to the rural population, instead of being preoccupied with the numbers of incapacitated Taliban and al Qaeda.

In Afghanistan, somewhere between a third and a half of its GDP comes from poppy cultivation and processing and much of the rest from foreign aid, so the illicit poppy economy determines the economic survival of a large segment of the population. This is true not only of the farmers who cultivate opium poppy frequently in the absence of viable legal and illegal economic alternatives. But, as a result of micro- and macro-economic spillovers and the acute paucity of legal economic activity, much of the economic life in large cities is also underpinned by the poppy economy. After a quarter century of intense poppy cultivation, the opium poppy economy is deeply entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of the society. Islamic prohibitions against opiates notwithstanding, the poppy economy inevitably underlies Afghanistan’s political arrangements and power relations. Profits from taxing poppy cultivation and protecting smuggling rings bring substantial income to the Taliban. A recent CRS report (August 2009) estimates the income at $70-$100 million per year, which accounts for perhaps as much as half of Taliban income. But many other actors in Afghanistan profit from the opium poppy economy in a similar way: former warlords cum government officials; members of Afghanistan’s police; tribal chiefs; and independent traffickers.

Moreover, the Taliban and many others who protect the opium poppy economy from efforts to suppress it derive much more than financial profits. Crucially, they also obtain political capital from populations dependent on poppy cultivation. Such political capital is a critical determinant of the success and sustainability of the insurgency since public support or at least acceptance are crucial enablers of an insurgency. Indeed, as I detail in my forthcoming book, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, along with providing order that the Afghan government is systematically unable to provide and capitalizing on Ghilzai Pashtun sentiments of being marginalized, protection of the poppy fields is at the core of the Taliban support. By not targeting the farmers, the new counternarcotics strategy is thus synchronized with the counterinsurgency efforts because it can deprive the Taliban of a key source of support. Its overall design also promises to lay the necessary groundwork for substantial reductions in the size and impacts of the illicit economy in Afghanistan.

However, while appropriate in its overall conception, the new strategy has pitfalls. Specifically how to operationalize interdiction and rural development will to a great extent determine the effectiveness of the strategy—not only with respect to the narrow goal of narcotics suppression, but also with respect to counterinsurgency and state-building. While many of the details still remain to be developed, some of those that have trickled out give reasons for concern.

Effects of Previous Eradication-Centered Policy

During the 2008-09 growing season, the area of cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22% to 123,000 hectares and opium production fell by 10 percent to 6,900 metric tons (mt). Much of this decline in cultivation was driven by market forces largely unrelated to policy: After several years of massive overproduction in Afghanistan that surpassed the estimated global market for opiates by almost three times, opium prices were bound to decline. Even at 6,900 mt, production still remains twice as high as world demand, leading to speculation that someone somewhere is stockpiling opiates.

More significant, the persistence of high production betrays the ineffectiveness of simplistic policies, such as premature forced eradication before alternative livelihoods are in place, which since 2004 (until the new Obama strategy) was the core of the counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. Policies that fail to address the complex and multiple structural drivers of cultivation and ignore the security and economic needs of the populations dependent on poppy cultivation generate vastly counterproductive effects with respect to not only counternarcotics efforts, but also counterinsurgency, stabilization and state building.

The eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar provides a telling example. For decades, Nangarhar has been one of the dominant sources of opium poppy. But over the past two years, as a result of governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s suppression efforts—including bans on cultivation, forced eradication, imprisonment of violators and claims that NATO would bomb the houses of those who cultivate poppy or keep opium—cultivation declined to very low numbers. This has been hailed as a major success to be emulated throughout Afghanistan.

In fact, the economic and security consequences were highly undesirable. The ban greatly impoverished many, causing household incomes to fall 90% for many and driving many into debt. As legal economic alternatives failed to materialize, many coped by resorting to crime, such as kidnapping and robberies. Others sought employment in the poppy fields of Helmand, yet others migrated to Pakistan where they frequently ended up recruited by the Taliban. The population became deeply alienated from the government, resorting to strikes and attacks on government forces. Districts that were economically hit especially severely, such as Khogiani, Achin and Shinwar, have become no-go zones for the Afghan government and NGOs. Although those tribal areas have historically been opposed to the Taliban, the Taliban mobilization there has taken off to an unprecedented degree. The populations began allowing the Taliban to cross over from Pakistan, and U.S. military personnel operating in that region indicate that intelligence provision to Afghan forces and NATO has almost dried up. Tribal elders who supported the ban became discredited, and the collapse of their legitimacy is providing an opportunity for the Taliban to insert itself into the decision-making structures of those areas. And all such previous bans in the province, including in 2005, turned out to be unsustainable in the absence of legal economic alternatives. Thus, after the 2005 ban, for example, poppy cultivation inevitably swung back.

The Ingredients of Success

Security
The prerequisite for success with respect to narcotics is security, i.e. sustained state control of territory. Without it, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and the state strengthened; nor can counternarcotics policies be effective. Whether one adopts iron-fisted eradication or sustainable rural development as the core of a counternarcotics policy, security is essential. Without security first, counternarcotics efforts have not yet succeeded anywhere. Suppression without alternative livelihoods in place requires firm control of the entire territory to prevent illicit crop displacement and harsh suppression of the population dependent on illicit crops. Apart from being problematic with respect to human rights, this harsh approach is also very costly politically. Rural development requires security, otherwise investment will not come in, the population will not make risky long-term investments in legal crops and structural drivers of cultivation will not be effectively addressed. Development under a hail of bullets simply does not work, and in the context of insecurity, illicit economies persist and dominate.

Nor have counternarcotics policies, such as eradication or interdiction, succeeded in bankrupting or severely weakening any belligerent groups profiting from drugs anywhere in the world. Not in China, Thailand, Burma, Peru, Lebanon or even Colombia. Instead, they cement the bonds between marginalized populations dependent on illicit crops and belligerents plus severely reduce human intelligence flows to the counterinsurgent forces.

But counterinsurgent forces can prevail against insurgents and terrorists without stopping or reducing the terrorists’ drug-based financial inflows—either by increasing their own forces and resources vis-à-vis the belligerents or by adopting a smarter strategy that is either militarily more effective or wins the hearts and minds. This was the case in China, Thailand, Burma, and Peru where counterinsurgents succeeded without eradication. Evidence that counterinsurgent forces can prevail without bankrupting the belligerents through eradication also holds in the case of Colombia where the FARC has been weakened militarily not because of the aerial spraying of coca fields, but in spite of it. Today, more coca is grown there than at the beginning of Plan Colombia; but as a result of U.S. resources and training, Colombian forces were capable of greatly weakening the FARC even though forced eradication virtually eliminated human intelligence from the population to the government.

Interdiction with the Right Focus
The broad focus of the new counternarcotics strategy on interdiction is well placed, but interdiction’s effectiveness will depend on its objectives and execution. Just like eradication, interdiction will not succeed in bankrupting the Taliban. The Taliban has many other sources of income, including donations from Pakistan and the Middle East, taxation of legal economic activity, smuggling with legal goods, wildlife and illicit logging. In fact, it rebuilt itself in Pakistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to the poppy economy. Overall, drug interdiction has a very poor record in substantially curtailing belligerents’ income, with only a few successes registered in, for example, highly localized settings in Colombia and Peru.

Instead, the objective of the policy should be to reduce the coercive and corrupting power of organized crime groups. But achieving that requires a well-designed policy and a great deal of intelligence. Previous interdiction efforts in Afghanistan have in fact had the opposite effect: they eliminated small traders and consolidated the power of big traffickers, giving rise to the vertical integration of the industry. They also strengthened the bonds between some traffickers and the Taliban (although many traffickers continue to operate independently or are linked to the government).

Large-scale interdiction that targets entire networks and seeks to eliminate local demand for opium from local traders, which some are arguing for, is extraordinarily resource-intensive given the structure of the Afghan opium industry. Prioritization will need to be given to devoting scarce resources to drug interdiction or directly to counterinsurgency. The odds of success are not high. But even if such an interdiction strategy did succeed in shutting down local demand, the policy would become counterproductive since in local settings its effects would approximate the effects of eradication, thus once again alienating the population. Such large-scale interdiction is thus not currently appropriate for Afghanistan.

But even the NATO-led selective interdiction of targeting designated Taliban-linked traffickers (the United States has identified fifty such traffickers) is not free from pitfalls. First, selective interdiction can actually provide opportunities for the Taliban to directly take over the trafficking role or strengthen the alliance between the remaining traffickers and the Taliban, thus achieving the opposite of what it aims for. In fact, interdiction measures in Peru and Colombia frequently resulted in tightening the belligerents-traffickers nexus and belligerents’ takeover of trafficking.

Second, uncalibrated interdiction can provoke intense turf wars among the remaining traffickers, thus intensifying violence in the country and muddling the battlefield picture by introducing a new form of conflict. Mexico provides a vivid example of such an undesirable outcome. In the Afghan tribal context, such turf wars can easily become tribal or ethnic warfare.

Third, such selective interdiction can also send the message that the best way to be a trafficker is to be a member of the Afghan government, thus perpetuating a sense of impunity and corruption and undermining long-term state building and legitimacy.

Finally, the effectiveness of interdiction is to a great extent dependent on the quality of rule of law in Afghanistan plus the capacity and quality of the justice and corrections systems, all of which are woefully lacking in Afghanistan and are deeply corrupt.

Comprehensive Rural Development
Rural development appropriately lies at the core of the new strategy because, despite the enormous challenges, it has the best chance to effectively and sustainably strengthen the Afghan state and reduce the narcotics economy. But for rural development to do that, it needs to be conceived as broad-based social and economic development that focuses on improvements in human capital—including health care and education—and addresses all of the structural drivers of opium poppy cultivation. In Afghanistan, these drivers include insecurity; lack of physical infrastructure (such as roads), electrification and irrigations systems; lack of microcredit; lack of processing facilities; and the absence of value-added chains and assured markets. They also include lack of land titles and, increasingly, the fact that land rent by sharecroppers has become dependent on opium poppy cultivation as land concentration has increased over the past eight years. Poppy cultivation and harvesting are also very labor-intensive, thus offering employment opportunities unparalleled in the context of Afghanistan’s economy.

The price-profitability of poppy in comparison to other crops is only one of the drivers and frequently not the most important one. Without other structural drivers being addressed, farmers will not switch to licit crops even if they fetch more money than the illicit ones. By the same token, however, farmers are frequently willing to sacrifice some profit and forgo illicit crop cultivation as long as the licit alternatives bring them sufficient income and address all of the structural drivers, including the insecurity to which farmers are exposed in illicit economies.

Unfortunately, the wheat distribution program that was the core of rural development in Afghanistan last year (and that is slated to be its key component this year) is likely to be woefully ineffective for several reasons. First, in 2008, the program was based solely on an unusually high price ratio of wheat to poppy, driven by poppy overproduction and a global shortage of wheat. However, this price ratio is unlikely to hold; Afghanistan’s wheat prices are dictated anyway by surrounding markets, such as Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Second, the program did nothing to address the structural drivers. In fact, it had counterproductive effects because the free distribution of wheat undermined local markets in seeds. Afghan farmers can obtain seeds; their challenge lies in how to obtain profit afterwards. Thus, some sold the wheat seed instead of cultivating it. Third, those who actually cultivated wheat frequently did so not for profit, but for subsistence to minimize costs of buying cereals on the market. In fact, because of land distribution issues, many Afghan farmers do not have access to enough land to cover even their subsistence needs with wheat monocropping. A key lesson from alternative development over the past thirty years is that monocropping substitution strategies are particularly ineffective. Fourth, if all of current poppy farmers switched to wheat cultivation, Afghanistan would experience a great increase in unemployment since wheat cultivation employs 88% less labor than poppy cultivation and harvesting do.

Instead of wheat, rural development in Afghanistan needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor-intensive crops, such as fruits, vegetables and specialty items like saffron. Generating lasting off-farm income opportunities will also be important, but even more challenging than jump-starting legal agromarkets.

After eight years of underresourcing and neglecting agriculture development, the new counternarcotics policy’s focus on the farm is appropriate. But the new strategy needs to take care not to throw away the baby with the bath water. The effort still needs to include developing value-added chains and assured internal and external markets plus enabling sustained access to them. Once again, thirty years of history of alternative livelihoods show that without value-added chains and accessible markets even productive legal farms become unsustainable and farmers revert back to illicit crops.

Finally, rural development requires time. Perhaps in no country in the world since Mao wiped out poppy cultivation in China in the 1950s did counternarcotics efforts face such enormous challenges as they do in Afghanistan—in terms of the scale of the illicit economy, its centrality to the overall economy of the country and hence its vast marco- and micro-economic and political effects, the underdevelopment of the country and its human capital and the paucity of viable economic alternatives. Even under much more auspicious circumstances along all the above dimensions, counternarcotics rural development in Thailand took thirty years.

Conclusion

Clearly, there is a need to quickly bring some economic, social and rule of law improvements to the lives of the Afghan people. Without such quick, visible and sustainable change, it will become impossible to rebuild the confidence of the Afghan people in the future, harness their remaining aspirations and to persuade them that the central state with support of the international community is preferable to the Taliban or local warlord- or tribal-based fiefdoms. But there is an equal need to urge strategic patience in the United States—both for counterinsurgency and for counternarcotics.

Eradication can be a part of the mix of counternarcotics policies, but should only be adopted in areas that are free of violent conflict and where sufficient legal economic alternatives are available to the population. Interdiction needs to focus on reducing the coercive and corrupting power of crime groups. Before interdiction measures are undertaken, an analysis of second and third- order effects needs to be conducted. It needs to be carefully calibrated with the strength of law enforcement in Afghanistan to avoid provoking dangerous turf wars, ethnic violence and cementing the relationship between the Taliban and the traffickers. It also needs to target top traffickers linked to the Afghan government. Interdiction needs to encompass building the justice and corrections system in Afghanistan and broad rule of law efforts. Rural development needs to address all structural drivers of poppy cultivation. It needs to focus not only on the farm, but also on value-added chains and assured markets. It needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor intensive crops, and not center on wheat.

Evaluations of counternarcotics policies need to back away from simplistic and inappropriate measures, such as the numbers of hectares eradicated or traffickers caught. Instead, the measures need to encompass the complexity of the issue, including, size of areas cultivated with licit as well as illicit crops, human development indexes, levels of education, the number of resource-poor farmers dependent on illicit crops for basic subsistence or vulnerable to poverty-driven participation in illicit economies, food security, availability of legal microcredit, prevalence of land titles and accessibility of land, infrastructure density and cost of infrastructure use (such as road tolls), availability of non-belligerent dispute resolution and arbitrage mechanisms, quality of property rights, prevalence of value-added chains, and accessibility of markets. The United States and its allies must reduce public expectations for quick fixes and dedicate increased resources to rural development for a long time. Although U.S. forces do not need to stay in Afghanistan for decades, economic development will take that long.

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Barack Obama’s presidency has witnessed widespread change throughout Africa. His four trips there, spanning seven countries, reflect his belief in the continent’s potential and importance. African countries face many challenges that span issues of trade, investment, and development, as well as security and stability. With President Obama’s second term coming to an end, it is important to begin to reflect on his legacy and how his administration has helped frame the future of Africa.

On July 19, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings hosted a discussion on Africa policy. Matthew Carotenuto, professor at St. Lawrence University and author of “Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging” (Ohio University Press, 2016) discussed his research in the region. He was joined by Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon partook in and moderated the discussion.

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Editors’ Note: To salvage his Middle East legacy, advance American interests in the Arab world, and align with the position of the international community on this conflict, Ibrahim Fraihat argues, President Obama must make the long overdue decision of recognizing a sovereign and independent Palestinian state before leaving office. This post originally appeared on Middle East Eye.

Driven by the search for his legacy in the Middle East, it seems President Barack Obama has decided to spend additional political capital on reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks before the end of his second term in office.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is working on a renewed peace push, including a possible Security Council resolution or other initiatives such as “a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet.”

While it is still unclear where President Obama is going with this renewed effort, he must understand that using the same old techniques of U.S. mediation will only exacerbate the crisis, consequently tarnishing his legacy in the Middle East. To salvage his Middle East legacy, advance American interests in the Arab world, and align with the position of the international community on this conflict, he must make the long overdue decision of recognizing a sovereign and independent Palestinian state before leaving office.

[U]sing the same old techniques of U.S. mediation will only exacerbate the crisis, consequently tarnishing [Obama's] legacy in the Middle East.

First, Obama should learn from the mistakes of his predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who also tried to reach a mutually acceptable agreement between the Palestinian and Israelis with only a few months left in office.

Reaching an agreement between the two parties under severe time pressure will not work. A party that is not interested in a peace agreement can easily maneuver by using delaying tactics until Obama’s term ends. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already utilized this strategy when he publicly rejected an invitation from Obama to visit the White House to talk peace because he wanted to “avoid any perceived influence” in the forthcoming U.S. presidential election. These remarks came from the same person who meddled in domestic American affairs by aggressively lobbying against Obama during the last U.S. presidential election.

Obama has already put in the effort by working with the parties, but now he needs to make decisions. Unlike many American presidents, Obama made the resolution of this conflict a top priority. Despite the brutal civil wars engulfing the Middle East region in the past five years, Obama demonstrated a firm commitment and allocated the needed political capital to make a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During his time in office, Secretary of State John Kerry spent more time on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than any other international conflict. However, the outcome of the Obama administration’s intensive diplomatic efforts has been a total failure. These negotiations ended without an accord or even a memorandum of understanding, agreements that could have built on Obama’s legacy in the Middle East.

Nonetheless, Obama knows very well who made him fail. Netanyahu repeatedly defied Obama: In Congress, he refused to engage in serious negotiations that could have led to an agreement, and he publicly lobbied against Obama’s election for a second term. Obama should not expect Netanyahu to change his position and cooperate on any renewed efforts that could save Obama’s failed legacy in the Middle East. This is the same Netanyahu whom Obama increasingly grew frustrated with throughout his presidency.

With the remaining few months in office, the time has come for Obama to shape his legacy in the Middle East the way he wants it, not the way that Netanyahu has lobbied to characterize it. Obama has an opportunity to take his place in history as the first American president to officially recognize an independent Palestinian state.

Obama has an opportunity to take his place in history as the first American president to officially recognize an independent Palestinian state.

Sooner or later, there will be a Palestinian state and the United States will recognize it. Obama knows that very well. So why should he miss this opportunity and let another president recognize it in the future? Obama should worry about his own legacy, not Netanyahu’s extremist views. Obama should never allow Netanyahu to shape his legacy in the Middle East and leave it stained with failure.

Obama’s Middle East legacy is equally bleak in other parts of the region. Syria could become Obama’s Rwanda; Benghazi and the late Ambassador Chris Stevens are witnesses to his legacy in Libya; al-Qaeda in Yemen is much stronger today than when Obama intensified his drone policy against the organization; only history will tell how the Iran nuclear deal turns out in the future. Unfortunately, Obama cannot change the facts in any of these countries with the limited time remaining for him in office. However, he can still restore his legacy in the Middle East by recognizing a Palestinian state.

By recognizing a Palestinian state now, Obama will have seized an historical opportunity to impact the future and establish a foundation for the next American administration in the Middle East. No matter who comes to the White House, they will have to deal with this new fact. Obama has the international community on his side in recognizing Palestine. France recently stated that it will recognize an independent Palestinian state if a final effort to bring about peace fails. Additionally, Sweden has officially recognized Palestine.

American diplomats have a tradition of balancing their views after they leave office as they become free from the pressure of the Israel lobby and domestic politics. President Jimmy Carter is a one example of this.

Obama should not fall into this trap. No matter how he adjusts his views after leaving office, he will never save his legacy in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if he does not recognize a Palestinian state while he still has the power to do so. The time is now and he must act rather than regretting it later.

President Obama, if not for your legacy, at least recognize Palestine for the Nobel Peace Prize that you received in advance. The committee trusted you and awarded you the prize before you achieved any real peace; do not disappoint them. Make sure you earn the prize, Mr. President. If not for your legacy or the prestigious prize, then please do something for your own personal pride and be the one who laughs last, not Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. President, recognize Palestine now.

Editors’ Note: One issue that has traditionally shared bipartisan support is how the United States should approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, write Sarah Yerkes and Ariella Platcha. However, this year both parties have shifted their positions farther from the center and from past Democratic and Republican platforms. How will that affect Obama’s strategy? This post originally appeared on the Israel Policy Forum’s blog, Matzav.

As the Republican and Democratic parties convene in Cleveland and Philadelphia, we expect to see numerous signs of the deepening polarization that has dominated this campaign season. One issue that has traditionally shared bipartisan support is how the United States should approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, this year both parties have shifted their positions farther from the center and from past Democratic and Republican platforms. This swing impacts whether the Obama administration, which has devoted significant time and resources to the negotiations, will issue a parting statement on the conflict.

In Cleveland last week the Republican party adopted a platform entirely dropping the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a move that puts the party further to the right than either AIPAC or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The platform states, “We reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier and specifically recognize that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) is anti-Semitic in nature and seeks to destroy Israel.” This language, combined with Republican nominee Donald Trump’s apparent disinterest in the conflict, makes it unlikely a Trump administration would prioritize Israeli-Palestinian issues or make any serious attempt at negotiations.

Conversely, this year’s Democratic Party platform reaffirmed the United States government’s long-standing commitment to seeking a two-state solution in the region. But the party took a notably progressive turn, highlighting both the importance of Israel’s Jewish and democratic future and Palestinian freedom “to govern themselves in their own viable state, in peace and dignity.” The contentious fight over the Democratic Party language, combined with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s (and her potential First Gentleman’s) passion for this issue reveals an intent by a future Clinton administration to reinvigorate negotiations.

As President Obama and Secretary Kerry consider their final months in office, one item on the agenda is whether to push a last-ditch effort on the issue—either by releasing some sort of Obama or Kerry Parameters based on the outcome of the failed 2013-14 negotiations or by supporting one of the international initiatives such as the French Initiative, the Quartet Report, or the regional Arab Peace Initiative, now spearheaded by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Likely to drive the administration’s calculus are the Democratic and Republican nominees and their political motives on the U.S. led peace process. The time to watch for a potential move, therefore, is between November and January. Given the administration’s support for its own party’s nominee, it is in Obama’s interest to keep the peace process on life support—but without resuscitating it—through January. Publicly, but somewhat unenthusiastically, supporting the various international initiatives and allowing other states and international organizations to sit in the driver’s seat sets a future Democratic administration up with the best chance of success.

Lessons from getting Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the table over the years include the wisdom to refrain from yelling about past progress in negotiations. Publicly revealing how far Netanyahu and Abbas were willing to go in 2014 would only harm the next administration’s efforts at resuming negotiations. Keeping the “Kerry Framework” in the administration’s pocket allows a Clinton administration to take ownership of the peace process should she be elected.

Alternatively, if Trump is elected, the Obama administration would have nothing to lose in revealing the fruits of its efforts in 2013-14. The administration would have little concern for derailing a possible Trump attempt (which is not likely to take place in any event) and could determine that releasing some sort of Obama or Kerry Parameters would shed a positive light on the administration’s legacy. Furthermore, should the Republican Party win the White House, neither Obama nor Kerry is likely to care about the damage that releasing such a document might do to either Netanyahu or Abbas.

The party conventions have solidified the deep divides—both between and within the parties—regarding the U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this campaign season. This divide, combined with a renewed international focus on the conflict, virtually guarantees that the administration will keep the conflict on the back burner before November. The election, therefore, will not only determine our next president but also the fate of the “Obama/Kerry Parameters”.

Note: Ariella Plachta, an intern with the Center for Middle East Policy, contributed to this post.

Last Friday’s summit between Italy and the United States was an occasion for American President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to discuss issues of mutual concerns, particularly Russia and Libya, and consolidate the personal bond they laid the ground for during their first meeting in Rome last year. 

The United States wants assurances that Italy will continue to support U.S.-European Union efforts to press Russia, including via sanctions, to stop fomenting unrest in Ukraine. Last March, EU countries committed to keeping sanctions in place until the second Minsk Memorandum—the Ukrainian-Russian peace deal brokered by France and Germany in February 2015—is fully implemented later this year. Yet, EU leaders will not make a formal decision on whether to extend financial, energy and defense sanctions against Russia before next June. Russia has been courting EU member states whose commercial interests have been most affected by sanctions. These include countries in financial distress, such as Greece and Cyprus, as well as countries where Russia-leaning governments are in power, such as Hungary.  

If Italy were to add its weight to this group, the intra-EU consensus supporting sanctions could begin to erode. Italy has, after all, strong trade, energy, and political interests at stake. Its businesses have paid a heavy price because of sanctions. Its energy policy has suffered as well, particularly due to the Kremlin’s decision to drop South Stream, a gas pipeline under the Black Sea that Russia’s energy giant Gazprom was developing in cooperation with a subsidiary of Italian energy company Eni. Above all, however, the Ukraine crisis has shattered Italy’s longstanding plans to establish a constructive relationship with Russia, which Rome sees as an indispensable interlocutor to preserve Europe’s long-term security and manage issues of international concern. 

Concerns about Italy’s position on Russia are, then, understandable. Yet, as much as Italy would like Russia and the West to mend fences, the chances that Renzi will break ranks with the United States' and Rome’s most important EU partners are low. What Italy will do is instead to insist on the need to reach out to Russia on those issues on which cooperation is still possible. Renzi made this clear during his visit to Moscow last month, where he reiterated Italy’s commitment to the Minsk II Memorandum but also insisted that Russia can make a positive contribution to ending crises in the Mediterranean, particularly in Libya. 

Libya has lately emerged as Italy’s most urgent foreign policy concern—which is why Renzi is seeking U.S. support to address the crisis there. The country is in a state of quasi-anarchy, with two rival governments—one in Tobruk, the other one in Tripoli—fighting for control over national resources. Libyan oil shipments to Italy have shrunk, while migration flows towards Sicily have exploded. Furthermore, groups pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (or ISIS) have started operating in the coastal cities of Derna and Sirte. The Italian government has signaled its willingness to take part in a multinational force, even in a leading role, to restore a degree of stability in Libya and contain the expansion of ISIS activities there (which, for the time being, are however quite limited). 

To this end, U.S. political backing and logistical assistance is key. Yet, Italy’s stated resolve to take action has not been matched with a well thought-out initiative aimed at clarify the scope, objective and mandate of such an international action. For an intervention in Libya to have any chance of success, it is of paramount importance that United Nations (U.N.) efforts to broker a deal over a national unity government between Tripoli and Tobruk succeed. Only in that context would the idea of sending in a multinational force supporting the national unity government make sense. Italy would then be best advised to seek greater U.S. involvement in the U.N. process, including by exerting pressure on the Tobruk government—and its key supporters, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—to accept a compromise. 

The meaning of the Renzi-Obama summit extends well beyond security issues. For Renzi, Obama’s support to his reform agenda lends more substance to his claim that his plans to reform the economy would boost not only Italy’s economic prospects but also its international credibility. This is of critical importance for Renzi as his reform agenda—which includes a comprehensive labor market reform as well as plans to overhaul Italy’s constitutional set-up and electoral law—are controversial both within Renzi’s own center-left Democratic Party (PD) and with the population at large, most notably with such key leftist constituencies as the main trade unions. 

For his part, Obama appreciates Renzi’s resolve to moderate German fixation on fiscal consolidation as the most appropriate response to eurozone financial troubles—a course of action the U.S. administration thinks has caused more harm than good to Europe’s, and indirectly America’s, economy. Lately, the German-led camp of EU member states supporting austerity has lost some (but just some) ground, particularly after the European Central Bank started its own quantitative easing program. But the U.S. president is convinced that EU countries need not only expansive monetary policy, but also more fiscal leeway to boost domestic demands. In strongly pro-EU and reform-committed Renzi, Obama has a valuable ally to make the case with the austerity camp that Europe needs growth more than balanced budgets.

Last Friday’s summit between Italy and the United States was an occasion for American President Barack Obama and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to discuss issues of mutual concerns, particularly Russia and Libya, and consolidate the personal bond they laid the ground for during their first meeting in Rome last year. 

The United States wants assurances that Italy will continue to support U.S.-European Union efforts to press Russia, including via sanctions, to stop fomenting unrest in Ukraine. Last March, EU countries committed to keeping sanctions in place until the second Minsk Memorandum—the Ukrainian-Russian peace deal brokered by France and Germany in February 2015—is fully implemented later this year. Yet, EU leaders will not make a formal decision on whether to extend financial, energy and defense sanctions against Russia before next June. Russia has been courting EU member states whose commercial interests have been most affected by sanctions. These include countries in financial distress, such as Greece and Cyprus, as well as countries where Russia-leaning governments are in power, such as Hungary.  

If Italy were to add its weight to this group, the intra-EU consensus supporting sanctions could begin to erode. Italy has, after all, strong trade, energy, and political interests at stake. Its businesses have paid a heavy price because of sanctions. Its energy policy has suffered as well, particularly due to the Kremlin’s decision to drop South Stream, a gas pipeline under the Black Sea that Russia’s energy giant Gazprom was developing in cooperation with a subsidiary of Italian energy company Eni. Above all, however, the Ukraine crisis has shattered Italy’s longstanding plans to establish a constructive relationship with Russia, which Rome sees as an indispensable interlocutor to preserve Europe’s long-term security and manage issues of international concern. 

Concerns about Italy’s position on Russia are, then, understandable. Yet, as much as Italy would like Russia and the West to mend fences, the chances that Renzi will break ranks with the United States' and Rome’s most important EU partners are low. What Italy will do is instead to insist on the need to reach out to Russia on those issues on which cooperation is still possible. Renzi made this clear during his visit to Moscow last month, where he reiterated Italy’s commitment to the Minsk II Memorandum but also insisted that Russia can make a positive contribution to ending crises in the Mediterranean, particularly in Libya. 

Libya has lately emerged as Italy’s most urgent foreign policy concern—which is why Renzi is seeking U.S. support to address the crisis there. The country is in a state of quasi-anarchy, with two rival governments—one in Tobruk, the other one in Tripoli—fighting for control over national resources. Libyan oil shipments to Italy have shrunk, while migration flows towards Sicily have exploded. Furthermore, groups pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (or ISIS) have started operating in the coastal cities of Derna and Sirte. The Italian government has signaled its willingness to take part in a multinational force, even in a leading role, to restore a degree of stability in Libya and contain the expansion of ISIS activities there (which, for the time being, are however quite limited). 

To this end, U.S. political backing and logistical assistance is key. Yet, Italy’s stated resolve to take action has not been matched with a well thought-out initiative aimed at clarify the scope, objective and mandate of such an international action. For an intervention in Libya to have any chance of success, it is of paramount importance that United Nations (U.N.) efforts to broker a deal over a national unity government between Tripoli and Tobruk succeed. Only in that context would the idea of sending in a multinational force supporting the national unity government make sense. Italy would then be best advised to seek greater U.S. involvement in the U.N. process, including by exerting pressure on the Tobruk government—and its key supporters, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—to accept a compromise. 

The meaning of the Renzi-Obama summit extends well beyond security issues. For Renzi, Obama’s support to his reform agenda lends more substance to his claim that his plans to reform the economy would boost not only Italy’s economic prospects but also its international credibility. This is of critical importance for Renzi as his reform agenda—which includes a comprehensive labor market reform as well as plans to overhaul Italy’s constitutional set-up and electoral law—are controversial both within Renzi’s own center-left Democratic Party (PD) and with the population at large, most notably with such key leftist constituencies as the main trade unions. 

For his part, Obama appreciates Renzi’s resolve to moderate German fixation on fiscal consolidation as the most appropriate response to eurozone financial troubles—a course of action the U.S. administration thinks has caused more harm than good to Europe’s, and indirectly America’s, economy. Lately, the German-led camp of EU member states supporting austerity has lost some (but just some) ground, particularly after the European Central Bank started its own quantitative easing program. But the U.S. president is convinced that EU countries need not only expansive monetary policy, but also more fiscal leeway to boost domestic demands. In strongly pro-EU and reform-committed Renzi, Obama has a valuable ally to make the case with the austerity camp that Europe needs growth more than balanced budgets.

Now well into the final year of his presidency, President Barack Obama recently gave a surprisingly frank and poignant review of his foreign policy record in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.

There were a number of notable takeaways from their discussion, such as Obama’s critique of European allies and their lack of follow-through in regard to the Libya conflict. But a central element of the discussion was Obama’s rebuke to many critics of his foreign policy. He complained that much of the “establishment” seems to have a foreign policy playbook that requires frequent and excessive use of force whenever a crisis arises that displeases the United States. Instead, Obama called for a much more restrained, selective, and strategic approach in the employment of American military power.

Making the grade?

In many ways, I think the president is right. As I have written before, Obama’s original and very lofty goals for his presidency have generally proven elusive. Barack Obama may not be able to heal the planet, rid the Earth of nuclear weapons, or stop the oceans’ rise as his signature legacies. 

But, in fact, there is a strategy, even if it is more often implied than explicit, and even if it falls short of the president’s own preferences of what writers and historians might say about his two terms in office. It is more mundane but nonetheless important. Obama is attempting to be strategic in the most literal and relevant senses of the word—defining priorities and holding to them, even when that makes him appear indifferent or indecisive in response to certain types of crises or challenges. Yet he has shown himself willing to employ significant amounts of force when persuaded that there is no alternative.

Consider just a few of the cases that seemed to be on the president’s mind in the conversation with Goldberg:

• Syria. Obama did not use force against Syria after President Bashar Assad violated his “red line” and used chemical weapons. Here I tend to agree with the president; the key point is that Assad had to give up all (or nearly all) of his arsenal. If that could be achieved without U.S. military strikes against chemical weapons depots, so much the better (there is more to say about Syria, however, and I return to that in a minute).
• Russia. Obama did not use force against Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. The president is right: Ukraine is not an American ally, and Russia has a larger stake in its future than does America. As such, economic responses are the preferred policy tool here as well.
• China. Obama stayed firm but restrained towards China in the South China Sea. He took longer to undertake freedom of navigation exercises in response to China’s growing claims than some would have preferred. But his no-drama Obama approach has been correct, as he has left little doubt that America is committed to freedom of these international waterways. 
• Afghanistan. Obama made it harder than it had to be, and still has not given U.S. forces adequate authorities to attack the Taliban. Moreover, the U.S. military footprint there is somewhat too small. But Obama ultimately and rightly concluded that America needed to stay committed beyond his presidency.
• Iran. There is no doubt: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is preferable to a military conflict with Iran, even for those of us who think that the deal could probably have been negotiated with tougher and better terms.
• Iraq. Yes, Obama pulled U.S. forces out too soon—but he was willing to return in 2014 once the situation deteriorated.
• Libya. We mishandled this badly and left too soon after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. Obama is right that European allies should have done more, but he is wrong to have assumed they would get it right on their own in the first place. If we’re assessing his worldview (as opposed to his actual record), Obama has been honest and fair and acknowledged a mistake at least—though, alas, he has not found a way to meaningfully correct the policy situation since 2011.

These cases add up to a far from perfect record. But they represent a much more credible foreign policy than Obama’s critics often allege. And he has avoided unnecessary escalation in a number of situations where a less judicious president might have erred.

I give Obama reasonable marks for carefulness and strategic thinking.

Finally, however, returning to the Syria issue: On balance, Obama has been more wrong than right. Yes, he achieved a modest success in eliminating chemical weapons. Yet the war has been a travesty. Staying out has not worked any better than President George W. Bush’s approach to Iraq (even if it has of course cost far fewer American lives). Worse, Obama seems to justify his Syria policy largely by invoking Iraq—as if the 2003 invasion and occupation there were the only alternative to his minimalist approach. There have been other approaches that would involve significantly more force than we are employing now, yet far less than we used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama continues to refuse to consider them seriously, hinging everything on a diplomatic process that is in many ways a substitute for a real policy.

So, as with any presidency, there is more work to do, and as with any president, there is no untarnished record of systematic accomplishment. But I give Obama reasonable marks for carefulness and strategic thinking. He has been a proficient commander in chief, and it is possible that we will someday badly miss his judiciousness.

In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has taken the two most important steps in nearly a decade to increase access to retirement savings for more than 55 million Americans who currently do not participate in a retirement saving plan.

The Treasury Department's myRA program, launched this month, will help new savers and the self-employed start accounts without risk or fees. And earlier this week, the Department of Labor clarified rules that will make it easier for states to create retirement savings plans for small business employees.

myRA

The new myRAs provide another way for new savers to build small nest eggs. They will also help consultants, contract employees, and part-time workers save for retirement or for emergencies. 

For employees, myRAs are payroll deduction savings accounts designed to meet the needs of new savers and lower income workers.  They have no fees, cost nothing to open, and allow savers to regularly contribute any amount.  Savings are invested in US Treasury bonds, so savers can’t lose principal, an important feature for low-income workers who might otherwise abandon plans if they face early losses.  Those who are not formal employees and thus lack access to an employer-sponsored plan can participate in myRA through direct withdrawals from a checking or other bank account. 

As the growing “gig economy” creates more independent workers, the myRA will be a valuable entry to the private retirement system.  These workers might otherwise retire on little more than Social Security. All workers can build myRA balances by redirecting income tax refunds into their accounts. Because a myRA is a Roth IRA (that is, contributions are made from after-tax income), savers can withdraw their own contributions at any time without penalties or tax liability.  

When a myRA reaches $15,000, it must be rolled into another account, and Treasury may make it possible for workers to transfer these savings into funds managed by one of several pre-approved private providers.  MyRAs won’t replace either state-sponsored plans or employer-related pension or retirement savings plans.  However, they will make it possible for new and lower-income savers as well as the self-employed to build financial security without risk or fees.  

State-Sponsored Retirement Savings Plans

The DOL announcement gave the green light to several state models, including Automatic IRAs, marketplace models, and Multiple Employer Plans.  About two dozen states are considering these plans and, so far, Illinois and Oregon have passed “Secure Choice” plans based on the Automatic IRA, while Washington State has passed a marketplace plan.

DOL’s proposed Automatic IRA rules (open for a 60 day comment period) would let states administer automatic enrollment payroll deduction IRAs provided that the plans meet certain conditions for selecting or managing the investments and consumer protections.  States would also have to require businesses to offer such a plan if they don’t already offer their employees a pension or other retirement savings plan. Companies that are not required to offer an Automatic IRA or other plan, but decide to join the state plan voluntarily could still be subject to ERISA. The Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution first designed the Automatic IRA, which was proposed by the Administration before being adopted by some states.

In a separate interpretation, DOL allowed states to offer marketplace plans without being subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).  These plans are essentially websites where small businesses may select pre-screened plans that meet certain fee or other criteria.  Under the DOL guidance, these marketplaces may include ERISA plans, but states cannot require employers to offer them.   However, if states sponsor a marketplace model, they could also require employers without other plans to offer Automatic IRAs.

Finally, DOL’s rules let states administer Multiple Employer Plans (MEPs), where individual employers all use the same ERISA-covered model plan.  MEPs are usually simplified 401(k)-type plans. Because the state would be acting on behalf of participating employers, it could assume some functions that would otherwise be the responsibility of the employer. These include handling ERISA compliance, selecting investments, and managing the plan.

The Retirement Security Project has issued a paper and held an event discussing ways states could create small business retirement savings plans. The paper is available here and the event is available here.

Together, the two initiatives—the new MyRA and the state-sponsored plans-- could greatly increase the number of American workers who’ll be able to supplement their Social Security benefits with personal savings.

The final months of Obama’s historic terms of office as America’s first black president are taking place against the backdrop of an ugly Republican nominating race, and to the sound of ugly language on race from Donald Trump. Progress towards racial equality is indeed proceeding in faltering steps, as the president himself made clear in a commencement speech, one of his last as president, to the graduating class of Howard University.

“America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college,” the president said. But on the question of progress on closing the race gap, he provided some mixed messages. Much done; more to do. The president picked out some specific areas on both sides of the ledger, many of which we have looked at on these pages.

1."Americans with college degrees, that rate is up.”

The share of Americans who have completed a bachelor’s degree or higher is now at 34 percent, up from 23 percent in 1990. That’s good news in itself. But it is particularly good news for social mobility, since people born at the bottom of the income distribution who get at BA experience much more upward mobility than those who do not:

2. "We've cut teen pregnancy in half."

The teen birthrate recently hit an all-time low, with a reduction in births by 35 percent for whites, 44 percent for blacks, and 51 percent for Hispanics:

This is a real cause for celebration, as the cost of unplanned births is extremely high. Increased awareness of highly effective methods of contraception, like Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARCs), has certainly helped with this decline. More use of LARCs will help still further.

3. "In 1983, I was part of fewer than 10 percent of African Americans who graduated with a bachelor's degree. Today, you're part of the more than 20 percent who will."

Yes, black Americans are more likely to be graduating college. And contrary to some rhetoric, black students who get into selective colleges do very well, according to work from Jonathan Rothwell:

Three worries on race gaps

But of course it’s far from all good news, as the president also made clear. 

1. "We've still got an achievement gap when black boys and girls graduate high school and college at lower rates than white boys and white girls."

The white-black gap in school readiness, measured by both reading and math scores, has not closed at the same rate as white-Hispanic gaps. And while there has been an increase in black college-going, most of this rise has been in lower-quality institutions, at least in terms of alumni earnings (one likely reason for race gaps in college debt):

2. "There are folks of all races who are still hurting—who still can’t find work that pays enough to keep the lights on, who still can’t save for retirement."

Almost a third of the population has no retirement savings. Many more have saved much less than they will need, especially lower-income households. Wealth gaps by race are extremely large, too. The median wealth of white households is now 13 times greater than for black households:

3. "Black men are about six times likelier to be in prison right now than white men."

About one-third of all black male Americans will spend part of their life in prison. Although whites and blacks use and/or sell drugs at similar rates, blacks are 3 to 4 times more likely to be arrested for doing so, and 9 times more likely to be admitted to state prisons for a drug offense. The failed war on drugs and the trend towards incarceration have been bad news for black Americans in particular:

Especially right now, it is inspiring to see a black president giving the commencement address at a historically black college. But as President Obama knows all too well, there is a very long way to go.

President Obama’s speech at West Point, outlining the way forward on Afghanistan and Pakistan, was followed three days later by two important events underscoring the president’s view that “our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms.” He conveyed a new smart power view of security that “derives from our people [including] … Peace Corps volunteers who spread hope abroad, and from the men and women in uniform who are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice …”

On December 4, General Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), addressed an audience celebrating the tenth anniversary of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD). He pointedly noted that hard power alone cannot fight terrorism; economic and social factors of terrorist populations should be addressed. He further noted that empowering faith-based approaches “is a tremendous asset to inform the ways we mediate and find common ground … to figure out what the other side of smart power means.”

Recognizing that educational reform is critical, ICRD to date has empowered about 2,300 Pakistani madrassas administrators and teachers with enhanced pedagogical skills promoting critical thinking among students, along with conflict resolution through interfaith understanding. Evidence of success is mounting as the program fosters local ownership reasserting Islam’s fundamental teachings of peace and historical contributions to the sciences and institutions of higher learning—a rich history that was misappropriated by extremists who took over a significant number of madrassas using rote learning laced with messages of hate.

Earlier the same day, President Obama’s newly minted Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams, himself a former Dominican Republic Peace Corps volunteer, received high marks from former Senator Harris Wofford—a JFK-era architect of the Peace Corps—and hundreds of NGOs and volunteer leaders at the “International Volunteer Day Symposium.”

Director Williams has embraced a new “global service 2.0” style leadership committed to championing Peace Corps volunteers alongside a growing corps of NGO, faith-based, new social media and corporate service initiatives. Wofford, who co-chairs the Building Bridges Coalition team with former White House Freedom Corps Director John Bridgeland, spoke about the present moment as a time to “crack the atom of citizen people power through service.”

The notion of a “smart power surge” through accelerated deployment of people power through international service, interfaith engagement, and citizen diplomacy should be quickly marshaled at a heightened level to augment the commander-in-chief’s hard power projection strategies outlined at West Point. 

According to successive Terror Free Tomorrow polling, such strategies of service and humanitarian engagement by the United States have been achieving sustainable results in reducing support for terrorism following the tsunami and other disasters from Indonesia to Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lawmakers should take note of these findings, along with the evidence-based success of Johnston’s ICRD Madrassas project (which, inexplicably, has not received federal support to date, in spite of its evidence of marked success in giving Pakistani children and religious figures critical tools that are urgently need to be scaled up across the country to wage peace through enlightened madrassas education and interfaith tolerance).

A growing coalition of now over 400 national organizations is amassing a “Service World” platform for 2010. They have taken a page out of the incredibly successful Service Nation platform, which Barack Obama and John McCain both endorsed, creating a “quantum leap” in domestic service through fast track passage of the Kennedy Serve America Act signed into law by the president last spring. Organizers hope to repeat this quantum leap on the international level through a “Sargent Shriver Serve the World Act,” and through private-sector partnerships and administration initiatives adapting social innovation to empower service corps tackling issues like malaria, clean water, education and peace.  

With the ICRD Pakistan success, a rebounding Peace Corps and the Building Bridges Coalition’s rapid growth of cross-cultural solutions being evaluated by Washington University, the pathway to “the other side of smart power” through service, understanding and acceptance, is being vividly opened.

A Brookings Global Views paper further outlines how multilateral collaboration can be leveraged with other nations in this emerging “global force for good.” It is a good time to reflect on all this as we approach the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps next year in Ann Arbor, where on October 14, 1960 President John F. Kennedy inspired students to mount a new global service.  

President Obama’s call to global engagement in Cairo in June, which ignited the announcement of Service World later that same morning, now demands a response from every citizen who dares to live up to JFK’s exhortation to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” along with our young men and women preparing for engagement at West Point.  

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Many within the United States and others abroad continue to question the United States’ role in the world. Understandably, Americans have grown wary of the country’s role in the world, some asking whether the U.S. still has the power and influence to lead the international community, while others question why the United States must still take on this seemingly singular responsibility. On the eve of a major speech by President Obama addressing these questions, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan released a new essay entitled, "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire: What Our Tired Country Still Owes the World," which was published in the latest edition of The New Republic. Kagan argued that the United States has no choice but to be “exceptional.”

On May 27, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and The New Republic hosted an event to mark the release of the Kagan essay and in advance of President Obama’s address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Kagan, a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at Brookings, was joined by The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier and The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt.

After the program, the panelists took audience questions.

Read the full article»

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• America Has Never Been Isolationist
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As President Obama prepares to give the final State of the Union address of his presidency tonight, he’s promised to stay away from the technocrat’s laundry list of to-do’s. Instead, he’s expected to deliver a speech that will remind his fellow citizens of their ability to “come together as one American family.” It’s going to be a tough sell, especially when the citizens are terrified of outsiders and suspicious of one another.

Most of the fear and paranoia revolves around the Islamic State group. Although the group poses far less of a threat to the United States than to our allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East, it is the sum of all fears in the minds of many Americans—an immigrant, terrorist, cyber, WMD, genocidal threat rolled into one. Its name alone can be invoked to indict Obama’s national security and immigration policies—substantive criticisms are unnecessary.

[T]he Islamic State group...is the sum of all fears in the minds of many Americans.

Most of those fears are overblown, but the president will want to tackle them each of them in his speech if he intends to calm fears and bring people together. He’ll explain why taking in refugees is not just living up to American values but also smart counterterrorism. He’ll showcase evidence that the military campaign against the Islamic State in the Middle East is bearing fruit. He’ll reassure Americans that the Islamic State can’t plant a skilled operative into this country and remind them that the best way to stop the unskilled lone wolf shooters inspired by the Islamic State is to close gun loop holes and monitor their behavior online before they act. He’ll demonstrate his commitment to blunting Islamic State recruitment, touting changes to how the government counters the Islamic State’s appeal online and in America’s big cities.

All of that is well and good, but it’s a bureaucrat’s (or think tanker’s) effort at reassuring the public. To truly succeed in mitigating America’s fears and bringing citizens together, our country’s leader has to acknowledge that their fears are real and explain what our enemies hope to gain by engendering them. While Americans’ fears may be overblown, they won’t be deflated by technocratic hot air.

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Barack Obama’s presidency has witnessed widespread change throughout Africa. His four trips there, spanning seven countries, reflect his belief in the continent’s potential and importance. African countries face many challenges that span issues of trade, investment, and development, as well as security and stability. With President Obama’s second term coming to an end, it is important to begin to reflect on his legacy and how his administration has helped frame the future of Africa.

On July 19, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings hosted a discussion on Africa policy. Matthew Carotenuto, professor at St. Lawrence University and author of “Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging” (Ohio University Press, 2016) discussed his research in the region. He was joined by Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon partook in and moderated the discussion.

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In advance of President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba and Argentina, three Brookings scholars participated in a media roundtable to offer context and outline their expectations for the outcomes of the trip. Richard Feinberg and Ted Piccone discussed Cuba–including developments in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, the Cuban economy, and human rights on the island–and Harold Trinkunas offered insight on Argentina, inter-American relations, and the timing of the visit.

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Richard Feinberg:

The idea is to promote a gradual incremental transition to a more open, pluralistic and prosperous Cuba integrated into global markets of goods, capital, and ideas. It is a long-term strategy. It cannot be measured by quarterly reports.

Ted Piccone:

...the key [is] to unlock a whole set of future changes that I think will be net positive for the United States, but it is going to take time, and it is not going to happen overnight.

Harold Trinkunas:

Cuba is really about moving, among other things, a stumbling block to better relations with Latin America, and Argentina is about restoring a positive relationship with a key swing state in the region that was once one of our most important allies in the region.

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Editors’ Note: The odds of wringing short-term concessions from Cuba's proud and nationalist leaders are stacked against Obama, Richard Feinberg and Ted Piccone believe. They argue the trip should be judged by its ability to expand constituencies in both countries who want a more open and prosperous Cuba. This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

President Obama's decision to make a historic visit to Cuba later this month is about more than U.S. politics or business opportunities on the island. It's a bold bet that

presidential diplomacy can secure a new normal in U.S.-Cuba relations after over five decades of hostilities, embargoes and gridlock.

Based on our years of analysis and policymaking in and out of government, we believe the odds of wringing short-term concessions from Cuba's proud and nationalist leaders are stacked against Obama. We also believe, however, that that is the wrong metric. Rather, this trip should be judged by its ability to expand constituencies in both countries who want a more open and prosperous Cuba.

To that end, Obama should draw on his extraordinary rhetorical skills to paint a vision for both Cubans and Americans of a future attractive enough to persuade the island's citizens, especially its ambitious and talented millennials to remain on the island and for the resourceful Cuban American diaspora to invest in that vision. This promise of a Cuban renaissance should include one where citizens freely exercise their chosen professions, engage directly with a transparent and accountable government, have access to the global internet, and travel abroad routinely for family and business purposes.

To help shape such a future, the U.S. delegation should engage not only with Cuba's historic revolutionaries but also with its next generations of public and private leaders from across Cuban society. The White House can also use the visit to leverage Obama's immense popularity on the island to speak directly to the Cuban people about their aspirations for a brighter future.

Given the longstanding feuds between our two countries, however, it will take longer than a year or two to unwind the accumulated distrust and build support for this new normalcy. On the U.S. side, major sectors have swung clearly in favor of normalization - business and agricultural interests, human rights and religious groups, and the broad swath of U.S. citizens keen to know Cuba after decades of isolation. Even majorities of Cuban-Americans and Hispanic voters favor engagement over the embargo.

These constituencies, however, are not yet strong enough to persuade Congress to lift the embargo. And Havana has done little so far to address the major sticking points in Washington's list of legitimate grievances, particularly in the key areas of human rights and economic reforms.

On the Cuban side, Raúl Castro recognizes that Cuba's ability to protect the social gains of the revolution depends on normalizing its participation in the global economy. Its economy badly needs the injection of U.S. commerce, professional exchanges and tourism that would flow readily once the embargo is lifted. Family-run businesses, farmers, young people and professionals in sectors like software and biotechnology also stand to gain from these changes.

Notably, many of those fighting for a more pluralistic Cuba applaud Obama's decision to declaw the embargo as a political shield for government hard-liners; it helps their cause for a more honest debate at home about how to reform Cuba's outdated model of state-centric development and to make government more accountable to its citizens.

The visit offers both presidents a rare opportunity to demonstrate to these various stakeholders that change is not one-sided but a mutual accommodation. There is nothing like a presidential visit to move bureaucracies and catalyze action.

For example, the visit could accelerate progress toward easing the embargo. Already, new rules encourage trade with the emerging private sector and with some state-owned enterprises. Cuba should now take steps to facilitate such commerce and stop insisting that all sanctions be lifted first.

As important, the two sides should expedite resolution of outstanding U.S. property claims dating back to the early 1960s, a key congressional condition for lifting sanctions. Prompt resolution of these cases would automatically create powerful constituencies in the United States for repealing the embargo and signal to foreign investors that Cuba is prepared to respect property rights and the rule of law. They could also demonstrate a willingness to resolve longstanding claims for compensation for citizens killed in hostilities during the Cold War.

In anticipation of next month's Cuban Communist Party Congress, President Castro can detail his plans to decentralize power, empower the legislature and reform the electoral system.

The precise timing of Obama's visit - just one month before the Party Congress - may signal that Raúl Castro and his pragmatic followers welcome a friendly nudge to recharge the reform process they launched in 2008. It also underscores how little time remains before Americans elect a new president who could reverse steps taken so far with the stroke of a pen. That is the kind of marriage of short and long-term interests that allow wise presidents to make history, and the ultimate test for assessing whether the Obamas' trip is serious business, or just family fun.

Editors' Note: Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard Feinberg reports from Havana on President Obama's historic visit to the island.

Walking the streets of Havana during Obama’s two full-day visit here, the face of every Cuban I spoke with lit up brightly upon the mere mention of Obama’s name. “Brilliant,” “well-spoken,” “well-prepared,” “humanitarian,” “a true friend of Cuba,” were common refrains.

These Cubans did not need to add that their own aging, distant leaders compare unfavorably to the elegant, accessible Obama. And the U.S. president’s mixed ethnicity is a powerful visual that does not need to be verbally underscored to a multi-racial Cuban population. But this skeptical question remained: “Would the visit make a lasting difference?” Would the government of Cuba permit some of the changes that Obama was so forcefully advocating?

In his joint press conference with President Raúl Castro, and in his speech in a concert hall that was televised live to an intensely interested Cuban public, Obama spoke with remarkable directness about human rights and democratic freedoms, sparking more than one overhead conversation among Cubans about their own lack thereof.

With eloquent dexterity, Obama delivered his subversive message carefully wrapped in assurances about his respect for Cuba’s national sovereignty. “Cubans will make their own destiny,” he reassured a proudly nationalist audience.

“The President of the world”—as average Cubans are wont to refer to the U.S. president—emphasized that just as the United States no longer perceives Cuba as a threat, neither should Cuba fear the United States. Offering an outstretched hand, Obama sought to deprive the Cuban authorities of the external threat that they have used so effectively to justify their authoritarian rule and to excuse their poor economic performance.

On Cuban state television, commentators were clearly thrown on the defensive, seeking to return the conversation to the remaining economic sanctions—“the blockade”—to the U.S. occupation of the Guantanamo Naval Base and to past U.S. aggressions. Their national security paradigm requires such an external imminent danger.

Obama sought to strengthen the favorable trends on the island, by meeting with independent civil society leaders and young private entrepreneurs. One owner of an event planning business confided to me, “I cried during our meeting with Obama—and I rarely cry—because here was the leader of the most powerful nation on earth meeting with us, and listening to us with sophisticated understanding, when our own leaders never ever do.”

Obama assured the Cubans he would continue to ask Congress to lift the remaining economic sanctions—but he added that the Cuban government could help. It could allow U.S. firms to trade with the Cuban private sector and cooperatives, and now with some state-owned enterprises “if such exchanges would benefit the Cuban people.” So far, the government has permitted very few such transactions—ironically, an auto-embargo. And the Cuban government could engage the United States in an effective human rights dialogue and prioritize settlement of outstanding claims.

Certainly, the administration needs Cuba’s help in broadening constituencies in the United States for its policy of positive engagement with Cuba. Some U.S. firms—Verizon; AT&T; AirBnB; now Starwood Hotels and Resorts; shortly, various U.S. commercial airlines and ferry services—are signing deals. And the surge of U.S. travelers visiting the island typically return home as advocates for deepening normalization. Obama’s entourage included nearly 40 members of the Congress, the largest of his presidency, he said.

But Obama still does not have the votes to lift the embargo. He told the Cubans he has “aggressively” used executive authority to carve out exceptions to the embargo, such that the list of things he can do administratively is growing shorter. In effect, he tossed the ball into the Cuban government’s court. Only if Cuba opens to U.S. commerce, only if it shows a disposition to improve its human rights practices, might the U.S. Congress be moved to fully normalize economic relations.

If Cubans were so impressed by Obama, why do I only reward him a triple? Fundamentally, because his White House staff failed to secure a schedule that would have exposed him more directly to the welcoming Cuban people. There were rumors he was to throw out the first pitch at an exhibition game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team (won 4-1 by the U.S. squad), but that opportunity was denied. Nor was he permitted to make his main speech before an outdoor Cuban public. As he walked around Havana’s colonial center, the authorities allowed only small crowds. Michelle and accompanying daughters, Malia and Sasha—potentially powerful symbols in a family-oriented country—kept subdued schedules. Overall, the Cubans managed to hem Obama in, and to hand-select most of the audiences from among their loyal followers, audiences that were predictably polite but restrained. Fortunately, the meeting with opposition activists went forward as planned.

Further, while Obama’s remarks were well received, his texts were not as well woven together by coherent narratives as they might have been. And many Cubans would have liked to hear more about specific measures to build a more prosperous economy.

When asked whether Castro and Obama had “chemistry” by a reporter, a senior Cuban diplomat preferred to refer to “mutual respect.” But the two leaders did seem to develop a real rapport. During the baseball game, they spent a full hour sitting next to each other, seemingly in relaxed conversation. And during a brief question-and-answer period at the end of their joint press conference, when a U.S. reporter peppered Castro with hostile questions, Obama jumped in to fill time while Castro—not at all accustomed to press conferences—struggled to compose his response.

Cubans will long remember this visit by the sort of charismatic leader that they once had, in a youthful Fidel Castro, and that they would long to find once again. In the meantime, the Obama administration will do what it can to reintroduce Cuba to U.S. goods and services, U.S. citizen-diplomats, musical concerts, sports stars—Shaquille O’Neal, among others—and other cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges. And it will also spread ideas, about how to improve the sluggish Cuban economy and gradually integrate it into global commerce, and in the longer run, to help give average Cubans a greater voice in determining their own national destiny.

Israel apologized to Turkey today for the May 2010 incident on board the Mavi Marmara naval vessel, part of a flotilla to Gaza, in which nine Turks were killed from Israel Defense Forces fire. The apology came during a 30-minute telephone conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, orchestrated by President Barack Obama, who was ending his 3 day visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Erdogan accepted the Israeli apology, and the leaders agreed to begin a normalization process between Israel and Turkey, following the past three years, when relations were practically at a standstill. (Last December, I wrote about the beginnings of a Turkey-Israeli rapprochement, and discussed more of the policy implications here.)

This development allows the two countries to begin a new phase in their relationship, which has known crisis and tension, but also cooperation and a strong strategic partnership.

The U.S. administration played a key role behind the scenes in creating the conditions that paved the way for an Israeli apology and Turkish acceptance. Undoubtedly, a close relationship between Turkey and Israel-- two of America’s greatest allies in the region-- serves United States’ strategic interests globally and regionally. At a time when the Middle East political landscape is changing rapidly, it was imperative to end the long impasse between Ankara and Jerusalem.

Over the past year, Turkey and Israel have also come to realize that repairing their relationship and re-establishing a dialogue is at their best interest, as they face great challenges in their immediate vicinity (first and foremost, the Syrian civil war).

United States officials emphasized that this is the first step in a long process. Nevertheless, the parties will have to make a great effort to overcome years of distrust and suspicion if they want the relationship to work. No one is under the allusion that relations will go back to what they were in the “honeymoon” period of the 1990s but modest improvement can be made. It will not be an easy task, and for that to happen it is essential that the parties not only talk to each other, but also listen to one another and begin to respect each other’s sensitivities. In order for this rapprochement to be successful, United States will have to continue to oversee discussions between Turkey and Israel, and remain heavily engaged in this process.