COMMENTARY

This is a season for summitry. Between the spring equinox in March and the summer solstice in June, President Obama will participate in no fewer than six international gatherings with his peers, from the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, Korea, to the G-20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.

A bleak narrative of 16 million plus people on the brink of starvation in West Africa’s Sahel region has captured headlines. But the brewing food crisis, spanning Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad, has been overstated, and the headlines fail to identify the core causes of food insecurity and malnutrition in the region.

Thinking about the U.S.-ASEAN relationship in 2030 is a useful exercise for testing the tenets of U.S. strategy in the region and in Asia generally.

We badly need to rethink our approach to Iran’s nuclear programs. We are putting far too much emphasis on Iran’s nuclear efforts without considering how these programs fit into Iran’s over military and strategic objectives. At the same time, we are placing too much emphasis on whether Iran has revived its formal nuclear program and the current shape of its nuclear facilities.

As the United States focuses its energy on engaging the Asia-Pacific region, it has a growing interest in promoting good governance practices in Oceania. More than just democratic values and respect for human rights are at stake, as important as those are. The Pacific population is set to reach 18 million by 2050 and unemployment rates are already alarmingly high.

Every day seems to widen the gap between the goals the United States is seeking to achieve in Afghanistan and its ability to achieve them. Even apparent progress, like the Strategic Framework Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan, seems more a warning on the inability to define specific goals, milestones, and resources—coupled with growing restraints on U.S.

Indonesia is at an economic inflection point, which was dramatically underlined this week as two stories broke on the same day. First, Indonesia reported that it set a historic record of $5.7 billion in foreign direct investment in the first quarter of 2012, an increase of 30 percent over the same period in 2011.

On April 26, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will address a State Department–sponsored conference on impact investing in the developing world. Impact investing makes an investment based on social and environmental impact, as well on financial returns.