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America’s Need for Clean and Resilient Energy Infrastructure can make its Global Climate Leadership Smart Again

America’s Need for Clean and Resilient Energy Infrastructure can make its Global Climate Leadership Smart Again

With a new president-elect in the White House, it is now time for America to move forward with bipartisan efforts to resuscitate its global leadership. However, this return to normalcy depends on the liberal epicenter’s techno-industrial quest for energy infrastructure modernization and innovation (especially in adaptive energy management systems). Confronted with the inevitable 21st-century thrust […]

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The Proposals for Renewing the State Department

The Proposals for Renewing the State Department

Not long before President-elect Biden started naming his cabinet, two sets of recommendations to reform the Department of State were published, one from the Council on Foreign Relations, one from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School.  The Economist noted their rich menu of proposals.  Secretary of State – designate Blinken will do well to implement a […]

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Recommendations from Dr. Zhivago

Recommendations from Dr. Zhivago

One of the most famous censored pieces of literature in the post Second World War era is Dr. Zhivago, a work by author Boris Pasternak about the life of a family during the Russian Revolution in the early part of the 1900s. Smuggled out of the USSR and taken to Italy for publishing, the story […]

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Preparing for Mayhem

Preparing for Mayhem

Once the Kremlin is persuaded that Joe Biden will become the US’s next president, it may go for the jugular. Already today, not election manipulation, but triggering civil conflicts in the United States could be the main aim of Moscow’s mingling in American domestic affairs.

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Trump in Review: Serious Questions Remain Unanswered

Trump in Review: Serious Questions Remain Unanswered

In 2016, the United States faced a wide range of serious foreign policy questions. The United States had not readjusted key frameworks for ten or twenty years or more. Candidate Trump used populist rhetoric, pledging to “build a wall” to restrict immigration and to “drain the swamp” of Washington’s elite, globalist ecosystem. Claiming to be […]

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Keeping The Peace And Protecting Taiwan: Squaring A Circle?

Keeping The Peace And Protecting Taiwan: Squaring A Circle?

    The unusual news that Taiwan’s legislature passed a bipartisan bill asking the foreign ministry to seek formal relations with the US puts a clear point on the latest round of China-Taiwan tensions.  It also puts a distinct strain on the old US approach of “strategic ambiguity” around Taiwan.  Regardless of the outcome of […]

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Choosing Deficits Wisely

Choosing Deficits Wisely

Most countries in the world right now are trying to find a balance between having their citizens trust their Covid responses, manage the inevitable debt and deficits that arose and continue to rise with mass shutdowns of the economy, and responsibly manage that debt and deficit level so that when a time for a recovery […]

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Old Disputes and New Weapons

Old Disputes and New Weapons

Whether it be the conflict in Syria, skirmishes in Crimea, Ukraine and Chechnya or the recent outbreak of conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the old disputes that were never fully resolved have often broken out into armed conflict since the end of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet regime often created some detente between conflicting […]

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Personal Battles Against Corruption

Personal Battles Against Corruption

Corruption sours healthy economies, always places freedoms at risk and awards the worst of the worst for doing the most damage they can possibly imagine. Much of the slide from corruption into a full totalitarian regime comes from purging those who may limit the powers of elites who wish to dominate their fiefdom. In many […]

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When you Just Want to Fly

When you Just Want to Fly

The effects of Covid will likely been seen in the economic collapse of many businesses in the autumn. While most societies have organised themselves to some degree to handle any future waves of the virus, the commercial effect will likely start to show signs of a deteriorating economy over the fall and winter months. Smaller […]

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Vietnamese Policewomen Shine Light on South Korea’s Commitment to Ensuring an Inclusive Society

Vietnamese Policewomen Shine Light on South Korea’s Commitment to Ensuring an Inclusive Society

“Korean Dream” stories of first-generation Vietnamese policewomen reveal that South Korea is indeed a mature democracy that cherishes multiculturalism and aims to protect the most vulnerable ethnic minorities. In South Korea, multiculturalism is not merely a symbolic recognition of the resource-abundant and high-status middle class immigrants’ bourgeois glory. Its “true guardians” defend it by realistically […]

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Towards U.S.–ASEAN Co-innovation of the Pacific Community

Towards U.S.–ASEAN Co-innovation of the Pacific Community

ASEAN(Association of Southeast Asian Nations)’s long-term susceptibility to the multidimensional Thucydides Trap between Washington and Beijing has turned the region into a theater of (soft power) competition between the two superpowers. Reflecting the many-faceted volatility of the region’s geostrategic landscape, the fundamentals of the U.S.’ strategic approach to ASEAN should gravitate more towards cultural initiatives […]

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The Benefits of Policy Diversity

The Benefits of Policy Diversity

There are few regions that share the same mix of familiar cultures, language, food and media like Spain and Latin America and separately so, the Middle East. While regions that share their heritage in the Anglo-sphere often dominate world culture and politics, the combined efforts and collective policy approaches of Spain and Latin America as […]

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Pandemic, Rights, and Commons: America’s Odd Challenge

Pandemic, Rights, and Commons: America’s Odd Challenge

An odd policy problem arises out of the Covid pandemic, in the interface (pun noted) between private rights, i.e. not to wear a facemask, and public mandates to wear them.  The collision of particular rights with needs of the commons arises in many global issues.  Henry Kissinger points toward it in the international relations context, noting […]

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Losses, Pandemics and Stolen Taxes

Losses, Pandemics and Stolen Taxes

  The Covid-19 pandemic affected the world in a negative fashion and almost all countries incurred losses in their communities, often their beloved elderly parents and grandparents, neighbours, family and friends. Along with the loss of some in our communities, we also lost employment and security, and have been stapled to a generation of debt […]

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