Why is President Barack Hussein Obama so weak and dysfunctional on foreign policy? While there are a great many items since he took office we could cite, let's examine just a few of the more recent items... *For all his blather about being 'disturbed' by the Iranian regime's violence towards its own people and not being 'reconciled to a nuclear Iran', Obama is doing a...

We are told that “experts” have now warned President-elect Barack Obama of a nuclear Iran. Iran poses the greatest foreign policy challenge to Barack Obama, the President-elect, with Tehran on course to produce a nuclear bomb in the first year of an Obama administration, a coalition of top think-tanks gave warning yesterday. Mr Obama must keep his

This article argues that Barack Obama's conciliatory tone has caused difficulties for the hardliners in Iran. Obviously, the US and Iran still have major foreign policy differences and the US is still determined to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons. However, Obama has made it clear that he wishes to improve relations with Iran and make the relationship more nuanced and less one of simple mutual...

Barack Obama's charismatic aura is obscuring an uncomfortable truth. His foreign policy is in crisis: problems with Iran and Russia are merging into a single, nasty mess. The US president must be tough enough not to be panicked into macho gestures, writes Gideon Rachman

Barack Obama might have little option but to follow George W. Bush's approach on a range of foreign policy issues, including Iran, said Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state

The greatest foreign policy challenge the Obama administration faces is Iran. The problem posed by Iran is compounded by the sheer number of ways in which Iran is a problem for the US. First and foremost, there is Iran’s nuclear programme. But then there is also Iran’s support for Shiite extremists in Iraq, its role as the major backer of the rejectionists of Hamas and Hezbollah and it...

The well-connected Jim Hoagland has a preview of how the Obama administration hopes the next year or so of its foreign policy will pan out. On Iran, still the biggest foreign policy challenge facing this administration, Hogland writes: ‘The next diplomatic trampoline for Obama is the G-20 summit [on September 24th], which he will host and hope to use to forge new multilateral approaches on I...

While the national attention is diverted over his domestic policies, President Obama has embarked on a course regarding Iran that will go down in history as a classic example of folly.It's so dangerous as to almost defy belief. It was Barack Obama who first introduced the policy of engagment with Iran to the point where Ayatollah Khamaenei justifiably mocked him by saying the US had no strate...

Barack Obama is the first Democrat to be Commander in Chief in the post 9/11 era. The election of a Democrat was a necessary requirement for the emergence of a new, settled American foreign policy for this time. You can’t have a bi-partisan foreign policy consensus when only one party knows the foreign policy challenges from the inside. Certainly the Bush administration made mistakes on fore...

In keeping with his recent foreign policy stumbles, Obama's address to Iran contained a number of head-scratchers.