In the context of the holiday season, Julia E. Sweig assesses President Obama's response to the Newtown shootings.

John B. Bellinger III says, "Over the last 230 years, the Senate has approved more than 1,500 treaties. In 2013, Mr. Obama must demonstrate leadership by putting greater effort in securing Senate approval of essential treaties that advance American interests, including the Law of the Sea Convention."

Peter Orszag explains why Build America Bonds could become victims of the fiscal cliff and why they should be saved.

Peter Orszag writes that reaching a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff will require Republicans and Democrats to be more flexible about the positions they have staked out over tax and entitlement reforms.

Peter Orszag writes that vague, simplistic strategies to limit tax deductions will lose their appeal as the legislative process exposes their flaws.

Sebastian Mallaby argues that President Obama will be unable to stabilize the U.S. debt over the long term without addressing the problem of ballooning health and pension costs.

Joshua Kurlantzick examines how the Obama administration relies on the Pentagon to serve as diplomatic interlocutor in Southeast Asia and argues against U.S. military cooperation with the region's most oppressive countries.

Analyzing the relevance of the electoral college in the 2012 presidential election, Julia E. Sweig says, "Although slavery has since been abolished and we have universal suffrage, this unfair electoral college system painfully, and somewhat quaintly, lives on."

In the Middle East, there is a perception that President Obama and the United States cannot be relied upon. But Obama's reelection is now an opportunity for the president to show his leadership and reliability in the region, says Ed Husain.

In the coming months after his reelection, President Obama faces a number of Middle East crises, the most pressing of which are Iran and Syria, says Elliott Abrams.

As the edge of the fiscal cliff approaches, Peter Orszag lays out the paths available to the Obama administration in negotiating with Congress over the expiring Bush tax cuts and entitlement reform.

Jimmy Carter is at it again, says Elliott Abrams on the former president's latest vilification of Israel in a recent Al Ahram interview.

Benn Steil's Forbes op-ed, co-authored with Dinah Walker and Romil Chouhan, shows why President Obama's touting of renewable energy as a job-creator is misguided.

Eliot A. Cohen, Eric Edelman, and Meghan O'Sullivan say, "The true audacity of the Obama administration lies less in its proclaimed foreign policy hopes, than in its insistence that its record is one of foreign policy success. It has, rather, been one of embarrassment, failure, and in some cases, disaster."

Peter Orszag proposes a placeholder deal to get around Congressional gridlock over the expiring Bush tax cuts by establishing a temporary tax refund that would last until either a permanent deal was reached or the unemployment rate dropped.

Benn Steil's column in Dow Jones' Financial News, co-authored with Dinah Walker, analyzes Mitt Romney's budget math. Without questioning the candidate's assumptions on growth or available sources of revenue, they estimate a roughly $1 trillion annual budget gap.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon says that Monday's debate displayed a rare moment of unity between Obama and Romney, who seem to have decided that, in this most domestic-focused of elections, dwelling on foreign policy would only lose voters' interest.

In this column, Julia E. Sweig argues that President Obama's foreign policy positions will make it difficult for Mitt Romney to define his agenda against Obama's in the run up to the election.

Fifty years later, the effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis linger still because of the persistent effects of one lie—that JFK won the day without compromising, writes Leslie H. Gelb in Foreign Policy.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon says Mitt Romney's major foreign policy speech on Monday reflects a vision for America's role in the world that is both far more forward-leaning than the current administration has exercised and far less energetic than Bush's.