Research Library

Marijuana decriminalization and legalization have gone past being a trend and are settling in as federal policy, writes nonresident fellow Gary Hale, a 31-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This policy brief includes recommendations for how the DEA can adjust its policies to adopt a new paradigm on marijuana policy.

Fellow Joe Barnes looks at the kerfuffle arising from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s critical — much-publicized — response to President Obama’s description of his foreign policy as “don’t do stupid stuff.”

Despite his sweeping electoral victory, it seems that Egypt's new president, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has learned little from the past mistakes of Mubarak and Morsi.

President Obama’s commencement address at West Point on Wednesday was clearly aimed at deflecting rising criticism of his administration’s foreign policy. In particular, the speech was designed to address complaints that U.S. foreign policy under Obama has lacked strategic coherence and signaled a U.S. retreat from the international arena. The administration promoted the address as a platform for the president to describe his “vision” for U.S. foreign policy during the remainder of his term. To the extent that the speech did present a vision, it was not a particularly new one.

Narendra Modi was sworn in as India’s new prime minister on Monday, a little over a week after a landslide victory at the polls. The resounding win gives Modi much greater freedom to implement his agenda than any Indian leader in recent years, says international economics fellow Russell Green. What will Modi’s India look like, and how will it affect the U.S.? Green, who spent four years in India as the U.S. Treasury Department’s first financial attaché to that country, explains.

Talk of a “pivot to Asia” that supposedly would mark President Obama’s second term is “misplaced and even simplistic,” writes fellow Kristian Coates Ulrichsen. In a globalized world, “key U.S. relationships with strategic and commercial partners … cannot be addressed in isolation from one another. The convergence of U.S. ties and Asian ties with the Middle East is a case in point highlights how regions and issues are interconnected as never before.”

As Israeli-Palestinian peace talks "stumble toward collapse," blogs fellow Joe Barnes, the U.S. "needs a thorough rethink" about its role in negotiations.

The situation in Ukraine is the most serious foreign policy challenge ever faced by the Obama administration, writes Rice faculty scholar Richard Stoll.

The United States should assign a particularly high priority on science and technology over the next four years, especially for federal support of research.

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Throughout the last two decades, China has…