From the uprising in Egypt  to the death of Gadhafi, read more analysis from TCF fellows and staff below. For TCF coverage from the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt , click here .

Follow TCF Fellows Michael Wahid Hanna (@mwhanna1),  Thanassis Cambanis (@tcambanis) and Jeffrey Laurenti (@J_Laurenti) on Twitter.

Egypt’s Voters Head To The Polls Thanassis Cambanis on NPR's Here and Now.

Egypt's Election to Decide Army's Political Future Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in AP.

Egypt: Court Sentences 5 Policemen in Absentia to 10 Years for Killing Protesters Michael Wahid Hanna quoted.

Egypt's Military Seeks to Preserve Powers Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Egypt Takes a Second Shot at Coming Up with a Fair Constitutional Convention Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Christian Science Monitor.

Egypt's liberals walk out, leaving Islamists to write a constitution Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Christian Science Monitor.

Roll Back to Find Peace Michael Wahid Hanna and Michael Cohen in Foreign Policy.

Egypt's Islamists Set to Dominate New Constitution Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Wall Street Journal.

An Ambitious Foreign Policy Vision Michael Wahid Hanna joins four other leading analysts for The Cairo Review of Global Affairs' online symposium discussing whether Ankara’s regional approach is meeting the challenges of a Middle East in transformation.

Iran Then and Now Stephen Schlesinger's op-ed published in the LA Times.

The Lost Dream of Egyptian Pluralism Thanassis Cambanis published in the Boston Globe.

'Khamenei Rid Government of 'All Internal Opposition Geneive Abdo quoted in The Jerusalem Post.

Egypt's military struggles with Sinai, its white elephant Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in France.

Coptic Pope Dies in Egypt Amid Church’s Struggles Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in New York Times.

Human Rights Abuses Across Syrian Borders Michael Wahid Hanna interviewed on The Takeaway.

UN Security Council to Focus on Syria Aid, Arab Spring Jeffrey Laurenti interviewed on Voice of America.

Egypt's Ruling Generals Play Risky Game With U.S. Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in AP.

Missing the Arab Awakening Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in The American Prospect.

A Test for Egypt: Hearing All VoicesTCF fellow Michael Wahid Hanna's op-ed in the New York Times.

The Lonely Battle of Wael GhonimMichael Wahid Hanna is quoted in New York Magazine.

Egypt's Elected Parliament Holds First Session Michael Wahid Hanna is a guest on The Takeaway.

Iran's Latest Political Pawn Geneive Abdo and Reza H. Akbari published in CNN's Global Public Square.

Egyptian Military Escalates Force Against Protesters Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Washington Post.

The Depressing Reality of Egyptian Politics: It’s Islamists vs. the Military. Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in The New Republic.

The Inevitable Rise of Egypt's Islamists Thannasis Cambanis published in The Atlantic.

Egyptian Elections: 62 Percent Turnout Michael Wahid Hanna interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered.

Egyptian Bloc Remains Hopeful Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Almasry Alyoum.

'Salafists Make Muslim Brotherhood Look Moderate' Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in The Jerusalem Post.

Islamist Group Emerges as Victor in Egypt Elections Michael Wahid Hanna interviewed on The Takeaway.

Egyptian Foreign Policy After the Election Geneive Abdo published in Foreign Affairs.

Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in The New York Times.

Can Reform CoEgyptians Vote Amid Uncertainty Over Army’s Role Thanassis Cambanis is interviewed on WBUR's Here and Now.

Egypt's Military Says It Will Cede Power Next Year; Demonstrators Demand More Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in McClatchy Newspapers.

US Backs Egypt's Military as Tahrir Square Crackdown Continues Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Christian Science Monitor.

The Death of Gadhafi and The Arab Spring Michael Wahid Hanna interviewed on PRI's The Takeaway.

An Apology for a Guatemalan Coup, 57 Years Later Stephen Schlesinger quoted in The New York Times.

Palestinian Chances at UN Will Worsen After Council Elections Jeffrey Laurenti quoted in Bloomberg News.

Libya After Gaddafi: What The Plight Of One Persecuted Group Says About The Future Of Libya Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in Huffington Post.

Yemen’s Saleh Faces UN Action a Day after Despot Qaddafi Killed in Libya Jeffrey Laurenti quoted in Bloomberg News.

Ahmadinejad's Impotence Geneive Abdo published in Foreign Policy's Mideast Channel.

Arming Assad Geneive Abdo published in CNN World.

Iraq: How Not to Overthrow a Dictator Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in the Associated Press.

How Iran Keeps Assad in Power in Syria Genieve Abdo writes in Foreign Affairs.

A New Libyan Leadership Could Recover Billions Jeffrey Laurenti interviewed on NPR.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in World Politics Review.

Thanassis Cambanis on NPR's Here and Now.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in AP.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted.

As the 28 NATO countries gather in Chicago this weekend, the focus largely has been on the future of the alliance's presence in Afghanistan. But there is of course a larger specter haunting the NATO summit: how does the alliance weather a growing era of budget austerity (on both sides of the Atlantic)? How can the burden of funding NATO military operations be shared by all 28 NATO countries?

It appeaers Mitt Romney has no interest in confronting these issues. Rather his campaign issued a statement that unsurprisingly featured an attack on President Obama for letting NATO down: "NATO's success requires strong American leadership," said Romney. "It also requires its member states to carry their own weight."

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has taken actions that will only undermine the alliance. The U.S. military is facing nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. And President Obama has sent the message—intentionally or not—that the worth of NATO has diminished in America’s eyes. At this moment of both opportunities and perils, the NATO alliance must retain the capacity to act.

There are a couple of problems here. The first and most glaring is to blame the President for the fact that the Pentagon faces $1 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. This of course was agreed to as part of the debt limit deal from last summer—a crisis almost completely manufactured by House Republicans. If Romney wants to cast blame for the Pentagon and in turn NATO having to do more with less, he should talk to the leaders of his own party.

But the real issue is that accusing the United States of not carrying its weight in NATO is, well, ludicrous. As it is, only 5 of the 28 countries in NATO exceed the agreed upon benchmark of 2 percent of GDP on defense spending—the United States spends closer to 5 percent. The United States currently provides between 20–25 percent of NATO funding; the recent Libya War would simply have been impossible to wage without U.S. military largesse. Quite simply, Libya provided compelling evidence that without the United States, NATO could not exist as a functioning military institution. On missile defense, which is intended to protect NATO allies from missile attack, the United States is underwriting close to 85 percent of the funding.

In other words, the biggest problem with NATO funding (and this has been true for quite some time) is not that President Obama is undermining the alliance with defense cuts here at home, but rather that America's NATO allies refuse to fully pony up their share of NATO's defense budget. And why should they? Indeed, as long as NATO funding is used as a political football, the United States will continue to be played for a sucker by the Europeans—who know that for all our complaining about their lack of financial support for the military alliance, we're never going to pull the plug.

At some point, it's worth asking whether this makes any sense at all. Why should the United States be responsible for underwriting European security (and in turn the European welfare state), especially when European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being? Moreover, if Europeans don't think it's important enough to spend their own money on their own security, why should America? Now granted, the Europeans are a little short on cash these days, but then so is the United States. But of course as the House of Representatives reminded us recently—as they eviscerated key social safety net programs to restore cuts made to the defense budget—you can't put a price tag on a huge American military that does little to keep America safe and underwrites the security of other countries.

In Romney's statement he noted, "NATO is a testament to the fact that the price of weakness is always far greater than the price of strength." If anything, it's increasingly becoming a testament to how divorced from reality our own national security debate has become. The new American weakness is apparently when you don't let key European allies take enough advantage of you.

* TCF fellow Michael Cohen's piece is a cross-post from Democracy Arsenal.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Jeffrey Laurenti in Blog of the Century.

The unraveling reported this week of U.S. police training programs in both Iraq and Afghanistan opens yet another window onto the strategic miscalculations that have derailed American ambitions in both protracted conflicts.  And more: the failures spotlight Washington’s ineptness in directing other countries’ reconstruction, with scant heed for local realities and sensitivities.

Iraq was always a uniquely egregious case, where the American invasion aroused worldwide opposition and fueled Iraqi outrage.  President George W. Bush seemed perplexed by ungrateful Iraqis’ adamance in demanding he commit to complete military withdrawal by the end of 2011.  As the deadline neared, an equally uncomprehending Pentagon pressed futilely to convince the Iraqis to keep U.S. troops for the long term.  When the last troops left in December, Washington pinned its hopes to maintain a security footprint on a large-scale police training program.

It turns out Iraqis weren’t much interested in Americans’ police training either.  The New York Times reported Sunday that the program, which has burned through half a billion dollars in just its first half year, is on the brink of abandonment, “in the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place.”

In Afghanistan, over Afghan government objections, American officials insisted on creating a locally based Afghan local police force of 13,000 men in areas most in thrall to the Taliban insurgency.  The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that a review by the Pentagon-affiliated RAND Corporation found these autonomous police ineffective against the insurgency and often deeply entangled in criminal activity, corruption, and extortion.  This was hardly a surprise to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who had predicted just such an outcome.

Still, many American opinion leaders seem locked in self-delusion.  Senator John McCain denounced President Obama’s decision to respect the Iraqis’ insistence on full troop withdrawal as “a consequential failure,” and castigated Obama’s timetable for troop phase-out in Afghanistan as “an unnecessary risk to the hard-won gains” of recent combat. (A consequential thought: were it not for the financial meltdown in 2008, McCain would probably be in the White House today.) In a similar vein, McCain’s successor as his party’s presidential standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, warned that the Iraq pullout would “put at risk the victories that were won” there under President Bush.

The focus on war-fighters as the drivers of American engagement is a distinguishing mark of the Washington debate, and a source of unease among many international partners.  The Europeans, whose participation in Afghanistan remains vitally important, have put far more emphasis on the “soft power” of social and economic reconstruction, and their representatives in Kabul admit dismay that “what dominates the agenda of Karzai and the United States is security”—namely, boots on the ground.

Washington, by contrast, often seems ambivalent if not outright skeptical about investment in reconstruction of war-shattered societies, to say nothing of deploying troops for non-combat peacekeeping.  Candidate George W. Bush in 2000, eliding the two, vowed to halt American military engagement “all around the world in nation-building missions.”  Such missions could only distract from the efficient, purposeful exercise of American power; the political, social, and economic accoutrements that were making their way into new multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations would be best left to the soft-hearted Europeans and Japanese.

As president, Bush launched two stunningly successful military campaigns to topple unfriendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently with little thought to how each country could reconstitute itself afterward.  “Nation-building” then turned out to be unavoidable.  In the unpromising context of foreign occupation and indigenous resistance, however, the efforts have had disappointing results.

President Obama has converted conservatives’ aversion to nation-building into a critique of their supposed penchant for armed interventionism, telling his supporters that Americans should “focus on nation building here at home.”  More quietly, he has sharpened the State Department’s own focus on securing peace in war-torn countries by organizing a new bureau of conflict and stabilization operations, dedicated to the twin mission of conflict prevention in fragile states and reconstruction of those emerging from debilitating conflicts.

In this respect, Washington is only catching up with the United Nations, which created a peace-building commission in 2005—with stout support from the Bush administration--to sustain international attention to countries recovering from conflict after international peacekeeping troops have gone home.  The World Bank is also increasingly engaged in assistance to fragile states under the road map of its 2011 World Development Report.

To date, the U.N. peace-building commission has taken on just a half-dozen shattered countries in Africa—“orphan countries” in which none of the world’s major powers has a strategic interest.  But the U.N. is developing an expertise in mending fragile societies—and in attending to local voices--that contrasts starkly to a U.S. government in thrall to Washington’s self-referential political priorities.

In his landmark study of international peace operations, RAND analyst James Dobbins, a veteran U.S. diplomat, concluded that “the United Nations has done a better job of learning from its mistakes than has the United States,” and that U.S.-led nation-building “has espoused more ambitious objectives, and, at least among the missions studied, has fallen short of those objectives more often than has the United Nations.”

With the United States fairly discredited in Iraq, as the failure of its police training mission demonstrates, it is increasingly the small U.N. political mission there that works to keep consolidation of the country’s fragile political system on track.  Whether U.S. influence will curdle as badly in Afghanistan remains to be seen, but America is still seen as primarily concerned about the security sector while the rest of the international community is more identified with the population’s day-to-day priorities.

When our politics allow us to invest resources in building peace commensurate with those in fighting wars, Americans may find more enduring influence in the long term.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Jeffrey Laurenti discusses the UN observer situation in Syria.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted on Egyptian presidential elections.

Michael Wahid Hanna in Foreign Policy.

TCF fellow Thanassis Cambanis in The Atlantic.

Michael Wahid Hanna quoted in New York Times.

Fellow Michael Cohen in Blog of the Century.

Senior fellow Jeffrey Laurenti writes in Blog of the Century

Follow on Twitter.

Jeffrey Laurenti is senior fellow at The Century Foundation and works on issues relating to international law and institutions, the United Nations and related agencies, the maintenance of international peace and security, and the politics of American foreign policy. He has served as director for TCF’s international task force on Afghanistan in its regional and multilateral dimensions and as co-director of TCF’s peace and security initiative with the Center for American Progress. He is the author of numerous monographs on subjects such as international peace and security, terrorism, U.N. reform, international law and justice, and other issues dealt with by the multilateral system. He was executive director of policy studies at the United Nations Association of the United States until 2003, and then served seven years on the association’s Board of Directors. He also served as deputy director of the United Nations Foundation's United Nations and Global Security initiative, which provided inputs to the work on international security of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change commissioned by U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey in 1986, has advised several presidential campaigns, and from 1978 to 1984 was executive director of the New Jersey Senate. At TCF he has been the coeditor of Breaking the Nuclear Impasse: New Prospects for Security against Weapons Threats (The Century Foundation Press, 2007) and Power and Superpower: Global Leadership and Exceptionalism in the 21st Century (The Century Foundation Press and the Center for American Progress, 2007) and his articles and analysis have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio, as well as numerous international policy journals and media. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in government from Harvard University, he earned his masters in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He speaks Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese.

This week I have shared the common fate of most citizens summoned to jury duty, milling about in the holding pen for prospective jurors without ever making it into a jury box.  It’s a long way from the county court house in Trenton to the international tribunals in The Hague, but my mind keeps drifting from the quotidian unfolding of justice for murder or assault in nearby courtrooms to the precedent-setting accounting for large-scale murder and mayhem that’s been rendered in those distant tribunals in recent days.

Last week in The Hague, the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity—murder, rape, inhumane violence, child conscription, and enslavement.  Taylor’s ferocious militiamen had terrorized Liberians into electing him president so the bloodletting might end.

But the tribunal did not nail Taylor for the crimes his rebel troops committed in a seven-year civil war that took 200,000 Liberians’ lives.  Rather, he has been convicted for actively assisting the even more reprehensible “Revolutionary United Front” militia in next-door Sierra Leone, whose rampages devastated that country for a decade.

The reason?  The exceptionally repellant violence of the RUF militiamen in Sierra Leone—routinely chopping off the hands or feet of civilians they did not bother to kill—finally provoked international intervention and creation of a U.N.-affiliated tribunal to try the perpetrators.  The United Nations did not create a similar special court for Liberia, and Liberia’s own fragile court system does not dare take on Taylor’s crimes at home.

So Taylor last week made history as the world’s first one-time head of state to be convicted of atrocity crimes by a U.N.-sponsored tribunal.  (Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic might have claimed the historical honor, but died before the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal could deliver its verdict.)  And the atrocities were committed by forces he did not command.

Although Taylor helped launch the RUF as a complement to his own insurrection in Liberia, he did not claim operational control over RUF forces, who had their own notorious leader in Foday Sankoh.  Their alliance was sealed by Sankoh’s diversion of Sierra Leone diamonds to Taylor for the purchase of RUF weaponry—which Hollywood brought to the attention of otherwise clueless Western publics through Leonardo DiCaprio’s starring role in Blood Diamond (2006).

Sankoh died in prison before trial; the tribunal convicted eight of his senior RUF lieutenants of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and they are now serving lengthy sentences in a prison in Rwanda.  But in convicting Taylor last week as well, the tribunal has found the outside sponsor criminally responsible for aiding and abetting the war crimes of his clients and allies.

The verdict is pregnant with implications for other government leaders who choose to arm and equip armed groups abroad.  Certainly anyone aiding insurgent groups that resort to mass atrocities is now on notice of potential culpability.  Perhaps even shipping arms to another government’s atrocity-stained security forces may be fair game for international criminal scrutiny as well.

The Taylor verdict thus sets a significant precedent on which the new International Criminal Court (ICC) can build.  The Sierra Leone tribunal that convicted him is one of several special courts established under U.N. Security Council resolutions to provide justice and accountability in specific conflicts where war crimes and atrocities seemed particularly egregious, including Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  These tribunals’ legacy has shaped the scope and workings of the permanent ICC created under the 1998 Rome Statute to prevent and punish genocide and other mass-atrocity crimes.

Just six weeks ago the ICC prosecutor secured the court’s first conviction, of Thomas Lubanga for the forced conscription of child soldiers into his rebel militia and their use in hostilities and atrocities in the Congo’s Ituri region.  Two other trials are currently underway, and seven more are scheduled to open soon.

Eight ICC indictees remain fugitives, including the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.  If apprehended, Bashir stands a good chance to become the first head of state the ICC convicts of masterminding mass-atrocity crimes.  (Rebels last fall disposed extrajudicially of the only other head of state indicted by the ICC prosecutor, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.)  The court has active investigations and indictments underway in seven countries in Africa, and is conducting a preliminary examination of complaints of mass atrocity crimes in eight other countries spanning four continents.

During the Obama years the United States has been an enthusiastic supporter of the investigations of the International Criminal Court.  The court remains, however, an obsessive bête noire on the far right, even if the military’s initial obdurate opposition has subsided as the court has proved itself.  In his riveting new memoir,  All the Missing Souls, former war-crimes ambassador David Scheffer has detailed the paralysis inside the Clinton administration as the Rome treaty was being negotiated, citing the president’s failure to overrule Pentagon paranoia and support the treaty taking shape there.

Clinton last-minute signature on the treaty has been shadowed by a formal letter George Bush sent to the United Nations disavowing any intention to become a state party.  But Bush himself blinked when the Europeans pressed the Security Council to refer the atrocities in Darfur to the ICC.  The great mystery today is why President Obama, a genuine legal scholar, has not simply revoked the Bush letter.

Here in the juror holding room of my county court house, we have all been treated to juror-preparation videos extolling America’s rule of law.  It seems only natural that the international community should crank up judicial machinery to enforce the rule of law against humanity’s most heinous crimes in places where no working national court system can provide justice.   Let’s just get on with it.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

Jeffrey Laurenti in Blog of the Century.

Michael Cohen in Foreign Policy.