Ted Galen Carpenter

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Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America.

This author wrote:

The pernicious myth that Iran can’t be deterred

Ted Galen Carpenter - Mideast Flashpoints - 12/4/2012
Rumblings about possible war with Iran have grown louder in Washington and other Western capitals in the past few months...

Washington’s Fading Faith in Deterrence

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 12/3/2012
Deterrence and containment were the twin pillars of U.S...

Worrisome Belligerence: GOP Presidential Candidates and Foreign Policy

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 15/2/2012
Foreign policy has not featured prominently in the campaign among Republican candidates for the presidential nomination. That may be a blessing in disguise. On the relatively rare occasions when those aspirants for the White House do address foreign policy topics, it is enough to make intelligent voters wish that the candidates would stick to domestic topics...

Obama’s State of the Union: too little foreign policy

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and Us - 25/1/2012
President Obama’s treatment of international issues in his State of the Union was profoundly unsatisfying...

Broken Promise of Change: The Obama Administration’s Defense Strategy and Budget

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 16/1/2012
Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008 with the slogan of “hope and change.”  In the area of defense policy, though, little substantive change has taken place during his three years in office.  That point was confirmed again in early January when the administration released its latest defense guidance document “Sustaining U.S...

China’s Increased Assertiveness and Washington’s Unsubtle Response

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 6/12/2011
November 2011 may well go down in history as the point at which the rivalry between the United States and China entered a new, more contentious phase.  Several events occurred during that month illustrating two related themes.  One was that Beijing had decided to end its relatively low-key stances regarding political and economic leadership in the Western Pacific and East Asia and to...

Cooperation and rivalry: The United States and China deal with Pakistan

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 14/10/2011
One prominent feature of the China-US relationship is the number of security issues that involve roughly equal elements of cooperation and rivalry. That is certainly the case with respect to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Both Washington and Beijing would prefer to keep Tehran and Pyongyang out of the global nuclear weapons club...

China’s perilous Libyan adventure

Ted Galen Carpenter - Asian Waves - 9/9/2011
The Libyan revolution (and the so-called Arab Spring generally) has created both opportunities and problems for China’s foreign policy. Before the onset of the 2011 turmoil in much of the Middle East and North Africa, Beijing’s policy toward countries in that part of the world was one of unapologetic realism...

Washington’s hemispheric headache: authoritarian populism

Ted Galen Carpenter - Global Issues - 4/8/2011
European political and policy elites fret that the United States, confronted by a growing array of economic woes, may be tempted to turn “isolationist.”  That fear is simplistic and overblown; there is very little sentiment in the United States for making the country a hermit republic and ignoring international affairs.  There is, however, a growing realization within the policy commu...

Troubled neighbor: Washington’s emerging security problem in Mexico

Ted Galen Carpenter - U.S. and the World - 14/7/2011
The principal focus of US foreign policy since World War II has been on Europe, with East Asia being a close second in terms of priorities. One reason why it was possible for US leaders to devote an inordinate amount of attention and resources to two distant regions was that Washington’s own neighborhood was generally quiescent...