We are seeing US policymakers moving ever closer to suggesting that Hosni Mubarak must relinquish power in Egypt. John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made that case today in the New York Times, calling on Mubarak to “accept that the stability of his country hinges on his willingness to step aside gracefully [...]

In a small reversal from comments earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged for an end to violence in Egypt, though she made that statement about both the government and protesters. As protests against the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak raged for a fourth straight day, Clinton said the U.S. is “deeply [...]

The Administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan review is out, and it’s very Panglossian, as expected. The five-page summary says that parts of the strategy are “working well” and that “there are notable operational gains.” They claim that the momentum of the Taliban has been stopped and reversed in “some key areas,” and that Al Qaeda senior [...]

John Kerry and Joe Lieberman seem to think that there’s space for a “huge energy debate” in 2011. That’s quite funny. What they are realistic about is that whatever bill they’ll try to muster will be fairly modest, and focused in part on renewing energy tax provisions. Actually, some Democrats are trying to include those [...]

Ryan Lizza offers a tick-tock of the failed effort to pass a climate change bill this Congress. In theory, with 60 Democratic members and the support of an axis of Joe Lieberman, John Kerry and Lindsey Graham, a bill that put a price on carbon could theoretically not be that hard to achieve. In reality, [...]

In a slightly surprising outcome (at least to me), three Republicans joined the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in approving the new START arms reduction treaty with Russia. The final vote on the committee was 14-4. According to Tony Fleming, Richard Lugar, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson joined all the Democrats in voting [...]

I’m going to advance a theory that the political leadership in Washington has a plan to declare victory and get out of Afghanistan as surely as the Administration is doing in Iraq. Call it a hunch. Lindsey Graham’s apparent reversal on the July 2011 transition date offered a clue to this strategy, though I think [...]

After Afghan President Hamid Karzai delivered twin warnings to the United States and NATO in the past few days, calling for a full review of the war effort and decreeing the removal of all private security contractors from the country, it was expected that the US would return with a message of their own. John [...]

While Alan Grayson hides behind a belief that statutory law governing net neutrality would be safer from rollback than a change in classification at the FCC, John Kerry takes the realistic view: A congressional stalemate has made passage of a net-neutrality bill unlikely for the time being, according to a statement from Sen. John Kerry [...]

In addition to the energy/oil spill bill getting deferred to September at the earliest, the Senate also delayed its work on the New START Treaty, which I’ve been calling the Prague Treaty because that’s where it was signed. The Prague Treaty would reduce US and Russian nuclear stockpiles significantly, by about 30%, and put a [...]

Robert Gates continued his anti-Wikileaks tour Sunday on ABC with Christiane Amanpour (who did a solid job in her maiden voyage on the foreign policy front; her Pelosi interview was a little more haphazard). He called Wikileaks “morally culpable” for the release of informant names (why isn’t the New York Times, the Guardian or Der [...]