Last year, Tim DeChristopher, a student in Utah, bid $1.8 million he did not have in a federal oil lease auction. He won the leases. He stated he did it to protect the environment and to prevent further global warming, arguing that the danger from this drilling was too great and immediate to try to […]
Since its founding in 1998 and its official kick-off in 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has had to build its strength and influence without any help-and indeed with strong opposition-from the U.S. “[E]stablished to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community,” including genocide, crimes […]
Last month, in Washington D.C., I met one of my favorite journalists, James Fallows, from the Atlantic Magazine. Mr. Fallows was returning from a 3-year post in China, where he reported on the country’s foreign policy, culture, its rising economy and its climate issues. We spoke briefly about about a 2008 article he wrote after […]
Presidents Hu and Obama finished their summit in Beijing and issued a joint statement. Below, Christiaan Tuntono of CSFB notes that President Obama didn’t get a commitment from China to revalue the RMB against the U.S. dollar, which would effectively increase Chinese demand for U.S. exports. As RMB undervaluation is a key focus of such […]
UNFPA: Impoverished women bear brunt of climate change The UN Population Fund has found the world’s primary agricultural workers — impoverished women — will bear the brunt of catastrophic climate change resulting from global warming. The UNFPA called for greater equality for women to relieve the disproportionate burden they are bound to experience from weather-related […]
1) To nobody’s surprise, Somalia is the most corrupt country on earth—followed closely by Iraq and Afghanistan. Transparency International wrote in its report, “When essential institutions are weak or non-existent, corruption spirals out of control.” The task, then, for America is institution building—but is it willing to spend the time and effort to create civil […]
FPA Russia blogger Vadim Nikitin tackles that question in his latest blog entry: “In the 1990s, the Russian film landscape had come to resemble something straight out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with stray dogs wandering through Mosfilm studios in Eisenstein’s footprints and actors and directors stumbling around a menacing no man’s land in search of money […]
José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has been a leading proponent of strong action against climate change, not only in the 27-nation European Union, but globally. The EU has been in the vanguard, particularly when the executive branch of the US was for eight years a captive to special interests and a politics […]
The Foreign Policy Association’s Children’s Blogger, Cassandra Clifford, has a chapter in the newly released ‘At Issue: Slavery Today’, designed for middle and high school students. Cassandra, who is also the Executive Director and Founder of Bridge to Freedom Foundation, which assists survivors of modern slavery, including victims of sexual and other coerced labor trafficking such as […]
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave an emotional apology on Sunday to the victims of a largely forgotten chapter of Western history. Addressing a crowd of about 1000 former child migrants, Rudd issued a national apology for the mistreatment they received from the government when they had been promised a new chance and a new […]
President Obama did a good job this week in China. Goodwill is a valuable intangible in politics, and he engendered some on his Asian trip. Still, the gloss is off the family car — the superpower with hat in hand is an oxymoron. The spectacle of the United States having to go to Beijing to […]
If the United States is going to criticize Pakistan for not securing their border with Afghanistan, maybe we should be making sure that the other side of the border is sealed, too.
Stephen Walt is spot on with this blog post. COIN enthusiasts are among the many in Washington who believe American foreign policy must maintain an aggressive missionary aspect. This isn’t really a problem—we should be striving to make the world a better place—but it currently manifests itself in ways that are prone to failure and […]
Foreign Policy asks the question: “Who Killed Copenhagen?” FP does list hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), but the real culprit is the institution itself: the United States Senate. Indeed, the Senate is where bills go to die. American healthcare reform has been slowed and stalled throughout the year in the upper house. But […]
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore last Sunday, Barack Obama acknowledged what many had suspected all along: that a comprehensive climate deal in Copenhagen, next month, is “beyond reach.” On a 3-day visit to China this week, Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao suggested that Copenhagen will be used instead as a […]