(Source: newyorker.com)

What is Obama really up to with his visit to Israel? John Cassidy has some thoughts: http://nyr.kr/YrNpT0

Photograph by Uriel Sinai/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)

How will American foreign policy evolve during Obama’s second term? Tonight, David Remnick is hosting a conversation about international relations with the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, and New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch.

Watch a live video of the discussion above, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/W1GSSv

Here, see full videos of the previous installments of The Big Story.

The Pentagon has yet to meet a military in a desperately poor or hopelessly corrupt country that it does not believe it can train and equip to a professional standard. Pentagon training has in fact strengthened and stabilized professional militaries in many developing countries. Yet some of the militaries that the United States has mentored in North and West Africa are best understood as criminal organizations that happen to wear pressed uniforms and epaulets. The better that some of these students learn to shoot while at Fort Benning, and the better the equipment they receive as favored clients, the more effective they become at their enduring vocations—drug smuggling, coup-making, and profitable collusion with pirates and terrorists.

Captain Amadou Sanogo, of Mali, was a longtime mentee of American trainers. He led a coup d’état against Mali’s weak democratic government early last year; after he seized power, reporters who interviewed him noticed that he proudly sported a United States Marine Corps pin on his uniform. As it turned out, Sanogo had been dispatched to the U.S. for training several times. Unfortunately, his skill as a mutineer ran “contrary to everything that is taught in U.S. military schools,” as a Pentagon spokeswoman later put it to the Agence France Presse.

…In the age of Barbary, as today, the most predictable aspect of war—and, for that matter, of American capacity-building—is that it will have unintended, unpredicted consequences.

Continue reading Steve Coll on on kidnapping in Algeria and terrorism in North Africa: http://nyr.kr/VuFaWu 

Photograph by Anis Belghoul/AP.

Cartoon by Christopher Weyant. For more: http://nyr.kr/149dGK2

Ever since his first inauguration, observers have been trying to pin President Obama down on a single overarching foreign-policy doctrine. Now that Obama has announced his picks to fill three of the most senior foreign-policy posts in his Administration during his second term, are we any closer to understanding his philosophies on war, diplomacy, and foreign aid? On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Steve Coll and Jane Mayer join host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the appointments—John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan—to the President’s core national-security team….

For more from Matthew McKnight on foreign policy in Obama’s second term: http://nyr.kr/ZNfzwH

(Source: newyorker.com / The New Yorker)

In the final Presidential debate on foreign-policy “some subjects were neglected completely, in part because they had never arisen as a basis for political argument during the campaign. The result was a lopsided map of the world’s troubles and potential crises, with some critical subjects completely unmarked, like a fifteenth-century scroll depicting the world beyond the known seas.”

Steve Coll looks at six consequential subjects that the final Presidential debate missed: http://nyr.kr/RYlAP5

Photograph by Stefan Falke/Laif/Redux.

Two debates took place in Boca Raton on Monday night, one embedded inside the other. Given that the candidates and moderator had only ninety minutes to work with, the intrusion of domestic issues couldn’t have helped but take away from the foreign-policy discussion. That is a cause for real regret—the world they talked about didn’t extend much beyond the Middle East and China anyway. But taken on its own terms, the second, shadow debate was not a bad one. It was surprisingly detailed, and the exchanges were in some ways more direct than the ones on foreign policy and even more so than previous ones on domestic issues. Despite the assumption that any mention of the economy would be bad for the President, it was also a fight Obama largely controlled. He won a solid victory on foreign policy in large part because he was more coherent than Romney in talking about things that had nothing to do with foreign policy.

Amy Davidson on the two debates in Boca Raton last Monday night: http://nyr.kr/XeYwAq

Read Dexter Filkins on Romney’s foreign policy and Evan Osnos on the candidates’ comments about China, and see our full coverage of the Presidential debates.

Photograph by Nikki Kahn/Washington Post/Getty.

BOCA RATON (The Borowitz Report)— The third and final Presidential debate ended in dramatic fashion tonight as President Obama punched Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the face, knocking him unconscious before a national television audience. Continue reading.