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 […]
David Brooks on the NewsHour this past Friday proffered an all too familiar argument. Speaking about the decision to try 9/11 suspects in civilian courts in New York, Brooks said: This trial will become another act of propaganda. The future trials will become other acts of propaganda. And I think we have to understand that […]
Many of you may have heard on the news about a missing five-year-old Shaniya Davis from Fayetteville, North Carolina, which first broke news this week as news of her disappearance led authorities into a desperate search for her safe return. The young girl was reportedly taken from the mobile-home of her mother while on a […]
How about some entertainment news? I know you don’t come to the Foreign Policy Association for entertainment news, but I thought perhaps my U.S. Role readers would be interested in a new television project by the CBS network. They are producing an end-of-the-decade look at America’s position in the world that will feature reports from […]
Kai Eide, the Special Representative of the United Nations to Afghanistan, did not mix words. Addressing the Committee of Development at the European Parliament in Brussels this evening, Mr. Eide began to vent some frustration against NGOs and INGOs. He was vague and did not single out any organisation in particular. Instead he said that […]
Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has a piece in The New Republic on “The Third Intifada.” The last paragraph is a chilling summary of his excellent analysis: For Washington, which is working hard to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, the Middle East impasse is about to get a lot worse. […]
A conversation in the comments section of one of last week’s posts deserves its own post. The conversation was geared toward answering this question: If the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rules some act illegal, is the act definitively illegal? Commenter Dan and I took opposing sides, him answering no, me answering yes. My position […]
Perhaps it is a complete coincidence that Brazil experienced a massive blackout affecting 60 million people only days after last week’s 60 Minutes showed a segment on cyber attacks on infrastructure including banks, internal governmental computer systems and power grids. In it, they mentioned a previously successful attack on a major electric power grid, which sources […]
1) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s State of the Nation address sounds good—but Julia Ioffe is skeptical in the pages of Foreign Policy. 2) A free trade agreement between the United States and Pakistan would be a welcome boon in bilateral relations. 3) This is an example of an exceedingly dry headline. 4) Netanyahu decries potential […]
It appears that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of activity coming out of Copenhagen – as we’ve known for a long time – but no final agreement. In a dramatic move, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, flew to Singapore to meet with key leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings. […]
A series of natural disasters has his Asia in recent months leading to increased concern for child malnutrition, as food security rises. There is no question that optimal infant and young child feeding is essential for optimal growth and development. Optimal feeding includes; breastfeeding exclusively for six months, and providing appropriate complementary foods with […]
The Obama administration took a major step today in fulfilling its promise to close the discredited Guantanamo Bay detention center and follow the rule of law with the announcement that five detainees charged with planning the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the USS Cole will be prosecuted by a federal court in the Southern District of […]
To the Pakistani military and Internal Services Intelligence: You are reaping what you sowed. But it is not too late to give up the obsessed, crazed determination to retain ‘strategic depth’ vis-a-vis India that has wrought such terrible destruction upon the peoples of South Asia. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the continuation of the […]