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But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.

Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.

“There’s a longstanding conventional wisdom that Israel doesn’t do well in wars of attrition,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian and a former ambassador to the United States. “That overlooks a broader historical view that Israel’s entire existence has been a war of attrition, and we’ve won that war.”

At the same time, the war on drugs has fallen short of its key economic goal: to make drugs more expensive, and therefore make them less accessible to drug users.

Michael Botticelli, acting director of ONDCP, wrote, "This Strategy … rejects the notion that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the nation's drug problem."

The idea is to cut down the supply, so drugs are more expensive and, therefore, less affordable and accessible for a drug user.

He focuses on three sorts of factors shaping security strategies: the motives of a state, its material capabilities, and the information it has about the capacities and intentions of others. Out of these variables, he fashions a rationalist theory that deduces the circumstances under which states will seek to cooperate or compete.

foreign policy is now being driven substantially by health to protect national security, free trade and economic advancement.

he United Kingdom is attempting to establish policy coherence with the development of a central governmental global health strategy based on health as a human right and global public good.

Switzerland has prioritized health in foreign policy by emphasizing policy coherence through mapping global health across all government sectors.3 Through the Departments of Interior (Public Health) and Foreign Affairs, an agreement on the objectives of international health policy was submitted to the Swiss Federal Council to assure coordinated development assistance, trade policies and national health policies that serve global health.

Our strategy for eradicating smallpox in the first instance was mass vaccination—vaccinate everybody in the room. Well, that didn’t work.

We’re able to isolate in an almost perfect way once he enters into isolation, so we reduce the density of susceptibles down to zero. Either there’s nobody in the room with him, or people in the room are wearing space suits. If there are no suspeptibles around you, it doesn’t matter how bad the disease is once you’re in a room and there’s no one you can catch the disease from.

Why do we see it in Liberia and Guinea? Because these are the poorest countries in the world, and they are all post-conflict. Their public health systems and economies are in shambles, and in America, we don’t understand because for us, if you go to Canton, Ohio, California or New York, they’re all part of the United States.

The Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) created a ‘solidarity fund’ to contain and manage the outbreak, [17] and the World Health Organisation convened an emergency meeting of regional health ministers in Accra to strengthen surveillance operations and facilitate cross-border consultations. [18] The World Health Organisation also opened a Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordinating Center in Conakry. [19] Doctors Without Borders has deployed 300 personnel to assist in health care facilities, and both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Union have provided scientific personnel and resources to assist with laboratory testing and government coordination. [20]

The World Health Organisation fulfilled its coordinating mission by organising a meeting of regional health officials in Accra in early July—but that was three-and-a-half months after the first report of the disease. WHO’s Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordination Center has the potential to be a useful resource, but it took nearly four months from the outbreak’s beginning until WHO began such operations. Given how quickly Ebola spreads and its virulence, such a delay helped the disease gain a foothold in the region. Arresting the spread of infectious diseases requires quicker action.

First, the current response needs to be ratcheted up. Opening sub-regional command centers, deploying personnel from governmental and nongovernmental sources, and providing financial resources are all important—but they need to be done in greater number and with greater urgency. The initial efforts are not necessarily failures; they are just too small and slow in response to the overwhelming nature of this unprecedented outbreak.

He sketched out three dominant approaches: realism, liberalism, and an updated form of idealism called "constructivism."

Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.

Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of democratic transitions.