Foreign policy

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson write for Project Syndicate about how to structure U.S. international trade policies so that they benefit American workers and global stability. “Two new principles can form the basis of U.S. policy. First, international trade should be structured in a way to encourage a stable world order,” they write. “Second, appealing to abstract 'gains of trade' is no longer enough. American workers need to see the benefits. Any trade arrangement that significantly undermines the quality and quantity of middle-class American jobs is bad for the country and its people, and will likely incite a political backlash.”

Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Joel Brenner, an instructor at MIT’s Center for International Studies and the former inspector general of the National Security Agency, argues that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was a counterintelligence failure that should be examined. “The intelligence community needs to take a hard look at the scope and effectiveness of its counterintelligence operations,” writes Brenner. “Like most intelligence failures, this one was probably more the result of a lack of imagination than of operational difficulties.”

According to Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post, MIT and Harvard are set to receive funding for a new foreign policy program from the Charles Koch Foundation. Prof. Barry Posen, who will lead the effort for MIT, notes, “This is not about politics. This is about policy and training graduate students and scholarship.”

John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies, writes for The Boston Globe about U.S. foreign policy missteps in the Middle East. “The Iran deal triumph was the work of arms control experts, not Middle East policy makers," writes Tirman. "The Obama advisers on the Middle East have been unable to anticipate events or respond creatively to them.”

Prof. Emeritus Ernest Moniz, the U.S. Energy Secretary, speaks with Marco Werman of PRI about his work on the Iran nuclear deal. Moniz explains that he and his Iranian counterpart in negotiations, an MIT alumnus, applied “the MIT problem solving approach…to march through quite a few issues.”

In a piece for The Financial Times about the Eurozone economies, John Plender writes about Professor Barry Posen’s argument in his new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy” for cutting U.S. defense spending. 

In a segment about America’s renewed involvement in Iraq on NPR’s On Point, Professor Barry Posen speaks about his new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy.” Posen argues that the United States should rethink its foreign policy and exercise a more conservative military approach in Iraq.  

In a piece for Forbes about U.S. foreign policy, Stephen Harner highlights Professor Barry Posen’s new book “Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy.” Harner outlines Posen’s argument that current U.S. policy should be replaced with a more restrained military approach.  

Institute Professor Noam Chomsky writes for The Huffington Post about how U.S. foreign policy is determined. Chomsky argues that U.S. policy urgently needs reexamination in order to address proximate and existential threats such as nuclear weapons and climate change.