Jeffrey Laurenti

The ghosts of the weekend massacre at Houla hung over United Nations envoy Kofi Annan's "frank" exchange with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad today, and the former U.N. secretary-general left no room for misunderstanding. Either Assad musters the political will inside his embattled regime to close out fifteen months of civil...

The unraveling reported this week of U.S. police training programs in both Iraq and Afghanistan opens yet another window onto the strategic miscalculations that have derailed American ambitions in both protracted conflicts. And more: the failures spotlight Washington's ineptness in directing other countries' reconstruction, with scant heed for local realities...

What's a conservative Republican not to like in a veteran senator who voted against President Obama's economic recovery "stimulus," against his health care overhaul, against his tightened regulation of Wall Street, and against "cap-and-trade" controls on global warming?

Yet over 60 percent of Indiana Republican voters yesterday decided...

This week I have shared the common fate of most citizens summoned to jury duty, milling about in the holding pen for prospective jurors without ever making it into a jury box. It's a long way from the county court house in Trenton to the international tribunals in The Hague,...

After going through 23 drafts, the United States and Afghanistan have at last inked a framework strategic partnership agreement to govern their collaboration past the promised 2014 withdrawal of foreign forces. Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai will sign the accord by the time of the NATO summit...

The Paris meeting Thursday of the international coalition supporting the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad sent a clear message to Russia, his chief defender in the United Nations Security Council: We're not wedded to Kofi Annan's peace mission, and if you can't put the leash on Syria's attack dogs,...

Easter Sunday seemed to mark a resurrection of sorts in Syria -- a resurrection of the fang-bearing, take-no-prisoners ferocity that has dominated the Syrian government's response to opponents, whether peaceful or armed. As fighting intensifies on the eve of the declared deadline for troop withdrawals and a ceasefire, it is...

The Israeli supreme court's brusque dismissal of Benjamin Netanyahu's "compromise" to avoid demolishing a West Bank settler outpost that even Israelis acknowledge is illegal spotlights the deep divisions within Israel about the ongoing settlement enterprise.

Awkwardly, it comes at precisely the moment when Netanyahu is seeking to...

With plans for both its options for orderly disengagement from Afghanistan upended this week by a staff sergeant's massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, the Obama administration urgently needs to alter the equation. The expiration next week of the current U.N. mandate for Afghanistan can provide the occasion.

The president has...

The startling explosion of public rage across Afghanistan at the bone-headed burning of Qurans by U.S. forces there has shaken the already tenuous confidence in the Obama administration's strategy for salvaging America's core war goals while drawing down troop levels. It has also, even more thoroughly, exposed the fatuousness of...

Iran was the one country to stand up in support of Syria's procedural challenge to the right of the U.N. General Assembly to debate the spiraling political violence back home, and with good reason: The aggressiveness with which the Arab states along the Persian Gulf are pressing for the ouster...

Any time that foreign ministers flock en masse to New York for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, the best political theater in town is sure to play out, eight blocks east of Broadway.

By the kabuki protocols of U.N. debate, Tuesday's globally-televised council debate on Syria...

Afghan president Hamid Karzai is feeling rushed.

After all those years of being constrained by the Bush administration's disapproval of negotiations with Taliban "dead-enders," Karzai now sees Barack Obama leapfrogging past his government to conduct talks directly with the Taliban. And with a whiff of the paranoia that...