Yesterday, President Obama delivered his much-anticipated Afghan speech. In addition to building the Afghan state and strengthening relations with neighboring countries, the President reiterated that America’s primary goal is to defeat Al Qaeda. To do so, another 30,000 troops have been committed, with a 2011 exit date in place. My viewpoint on the war in […]
President Obama will address the country tonight from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and explain his decision to send 30,000 more tropps to Afghanistan over the next six months. I’m looking over my past blog posts on the subject of Afghanistan and I’d like to call attention to this one in which Gilles […]
Patricia Kushlis has a post in WhirledView on President Obama’s commitment to increase the number of U.S. students going to China from the current number of 20,000 to 100,000. Her excellent post is here. As she notes, this represents an enormous increase – in the number of US students in China and in the overall number of U.S. […]
“EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!” Slightly off topic, though worthwhile nonetheless, is this 1960s advertisement for Humble Oil, the predecessor of Exxon U.S.A. Best viewed in its largest size, as the text is just as raunchy as the accompanying slogan. A retrospective that is so right and so […]
In his 2008 book, Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffery Sachs wrote: “In the end, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted by the rest of the world, with the United States refusing to ratify it. President Clinton never sent it to the Senate for ratification (fearing immediate defeat), and President George W. Bush rejected it […]
TheAlliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange notes [t]he Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved last week a measure that would make changes to foreign assistance programs, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), CQ.com and Foreign Policy.com both report. The approved bill would authorize $255 million over six years to establish a council within […]
This week it was announced, to the surprise of many, that the U.S. will indeed commit to a greenhouse gas reduction target, in time for the Copenhagen summit. There is much speculation that the target will be consistent with the proposed 17-20% reduction targets (from 2005 levels, by 2020), contained in the climate legislation currently […]
Iran recently rejected a compromise plan proposed the UN Security Council members that would have sent uranium to Russia and France, where it would be processed into fuel rods and sent back to Iran for use in a research reactor . This would have been a classic compromise, one that satisfied no one and yet […]
Earlier this fall the Brookings Institution published a report titled “A New Way Forward: Encouraging Greater Cultural Engagement with the Muslim World,” by Cynthia Schneider (who certainly has the qualifications to write about this topic as an art historian, former ambassador to the Hague, professor of culture and diplomacy at Georgetown and fellow at Brookings). […]
I recently re-read Martin Wolf’s, “Why Globalization Works.” I first read the book in graduate school and it shows. An abundance of neon Post-It papers are still poking out at the spine, the margins are littered with summaries and, in an effort to note the “important parts,” almost all of the text is underlined. Evidently, […]
1. The Asia Society’s incredible video documenting the mass loss of the world’s largest glaciers. Check out the “Then & Now” comparisons for some perspective. 2. Thomas Friedman takes on the global warming skeptics: “Not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, […]
Here’s an interesting news item that I came across while reading up on President Obama’s trip to China. Long an established academic powerhouse and home to many of the world’s top institutions of higher learning, is the U.S. still an attractive destination for international students? According to The Wall Street Journal blog The Wealth Report […]
NAFSA, the association of international educators, a released a report this week noting that “[f]oreign students and their dependents continue to make a significant contribution to local and state economies, spending $17.6 billion in the United States during the 2008- 2009 academic year…California, New York, and Texas welcomed the largest numbers of foreign students, and those states […]
Now that the big Asia trip is history, it’s natural to judge it on the basis of known results from its biggest portion — Obama’s three days in China. For the American president, there were no obvious breakthroughs on exchange rates or trade, climate or human rights, so maybe this visit was not the most […]
President Obama’s visit to China has ended. As I reviewed the coverage of his visit I was looking to see how he would balance the traditional U.S. concern for human rights with trade and security concerns. Would he, as past presidents have done, sternly lecture the Chinese on human rights, or would he (as Secretary […]