Lest my last post left the misimpression that I consider the issue of South Korean nuclear fuel reprocessing to be unimportant, let me emphasize this: I don’t consider it unimportant, merely unpromising as a path for furthering the cause of arms control and disarmament. To elaborate, as I see it, the case against South Korean […]
Last week Daniel Hannan of the Telegraph argued that since, per the Lisbon Treaty, the EU can now sign treaties, it is now a state (h/t Opinio Juris). Hannan cites Article I of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: The state as a person of international law should possess the […]
“Transnational crime” suggests new answers to an old question: what is the relationship between organized crime and terrorist funding?
IRAQ POST-ELECTION VIOLENCE 18 Jul: Suicide bomber kills 43 in attack on government-backed Sunni militia in Radwaniya near Baghdad 7 Jul: Series of bombings targeting Shia pilgrims attending festival in Baghdad leave more than 40 people dead 20 Jun: 26 killed in twin suicide car bombings close to bank in Baghdad 21 May: Car […]
If you’ve been closely following the best daily press or tuning into debates among professional arms controllers, you will have noticed some concern about China’s intention to supply additional nuclear power to Pakistan and South Korea’s growing determination to reprocess nuclear fuels. Just how concerned should we be? To be honest, though I recognize that […]
According to a just released ABC news report, U.S. public support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped from 52% in December to 43% today. The Taliban must be rejoicing because this shows, at least for the moment that their strategy is working. The bottom line is the Taliban knows they can’t beat U.S. forces […]
On Wednesday, NATO and the Karzai government struck a deal to arm Afghan locals for defense against the Taliban. It’s a temporary measure devised to make up for the slowness of training permanent security forces. The local forces will be paid for and supervised by the Afghan Interior Ministry. But, of course, there are risks. […]
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]
Shallow piece in the NYTimes today on a modest slowdown in economic growth reported in China for the second quarter, prettily written by non-economists. For a better analysis, not so elegantly written, have a look at the CSFB note from today (below) that explains that growth has slowed due to slackening investment (in Chinese terms […]
Ezra Klein recently wrote: Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren’t. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world. In response, Daniel […]
Last week David Fedman of the FPA East Asia blog posted a beautifully disturbing and disturbingly beautiful video made by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. Here it is in case you missed it. Watch and be hypnotized.
I had one of the best 4th of July weekends ever. I got to go on long scenic bike rides with friends, hang out at barbeques, and top off the weekend experience by watching a fireworks show which for reasons unknown to me was paid for by BP. Go figure. In spite of the fun, […]
The U.S. has a time-inconsistency dilemma with North Korea. In a time-inconsistency dilemma, someone’s preferences change over time. The concept is usually applied to behavioral economics, but it also applies to security situations. Take terrorism. The U.S. may want to negotiate with a terrorist to prevent him from committing future attacks. But negotiating might encourage […]
We’ve been waiting since mid-June to find out what consequences will follow from North Korea’s presumed sinking of a South Korean warship, since the Obama administration has repeatedly said that such a wanton act cannot be allowed to stand without consequences. As yet the UN Security Council has not adopted tougher sanctions to punish the […]
A while ago I read the book, The Marketplace of Revolution, in which T. H. Breen writes of the British Empire: Eighteenth-century writers seemed uncertain how best to describe Britain’s relation to its many overseas possessions. Only tepidly did they employ the concept of “empire,” since for them it carried uncomfortable intellectual baggage from ancient […]