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anonymous

Bipartisan Spring - 0 views

  • How to explain this surprising if well-concealed comity? Some is due to the inevitable transformation that every party goes through when it moves from the opposition to the White House. Being in power tends to breed responsibility, just as being out of power breeds irresponsibility. Many Republicans during the Clinton years turned toward quasi-isolationism and opposed Clinton's policies -- even his hawkish policies -- simply because they hated Clinton. Many Democrats  showed great solidarity with Bush after September 11, 2001 -- a bipartisan moment that Bush helped squander. But they soon came to oppose almost everything Bush did, even policies traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, such as democracy promotion and nation-building, and even when, as in the case of the surge in Iraq, the most likely beneficiary of success would be a Democratic president.
    • anonymous
       
      This is classically predictable behavior. To add to the example: Note how every time a Democrat inhabits the Oval Office, Republicans "rediscover" small government. You can practically set your watch to it.
  • The irony is that in some ways Obama has been fighting the war on terror at least as vigorously as his predecessor. He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He greatly increased drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. Indeed, the Obama administration carried out more drone strikes in its first year than the Bush administration carried out in the previous five years combined, producing a record number of enemy casualties. Although the Obama administration may be more generous in providing legal defense to captured terrorists than the Bush administration, it also makes a greater effort to assassinate them, thus obviating the need for trials. 
    • anonymous
       
      A hypothetical president Nader would have even done this stuff, however reluctantly. I think the American electorate deeply misunderstands the degree of pressure on any sitting president to continue policies. *Inertia* is a powerful force in all politics.
  • The most absurd of the "un-Bush" policies of this administration has been its deliberate turn away from helping democrats against autocracies abroad.
    • anonymous
       
      We have never seriously cared about the whole "democracy vs. autocracy" issue. It's a white-bread tool used to sway the electorate. It makes for good flag-waving but, in matters of foreign policy, is practically irrelevant.
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    "Washington may be deeply polarized on domestic matters, but when it comes to foreign affairs, a remarkable consensus is taking shape." By Robert Kagan on March 3, 2010 I've maintained for a while that foreign policy is one of those arenas where even when Republicans and Democrats differ, it's not *enough* difference to matter - obligatory histrionics aside.
anonymous

Obama Is Making Bush's Big Mistake on Russia - 0 views

  • Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev, reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin.
    • anonymous
       
      If true, this could be a grevious mistake, as Russia has shown a historic knack for tightly managed foreign policy under strong leaders (which Putin is).
  • After his first meeting with then-President Putin in June 2001, George W. Bush famously said: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
    • anonymous
       
      That was hilarious, even at the time. My sincere hope was that the statement was intended for the domestic audience (to give comfort), because if it was for the international audience, then Bush very likely came off as very, very naive.
  • And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin.
    • anonymous
       
      My hope is that *this* is a conservative, careful way to say that Obama will give the benefit of the doubt. While I have only epheremal reasons to think this, Obama seems a bit shrewder than Bush.
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  • For all his talk of reform -- and so far it is just that, talk -- Medvedev still claims that Russia is a working democracy that protects the liberties of individual Russians despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
    • anonymous
       
      Which is as laughable as that earlier Bush quote about "sensing his soul."
  • On Medvedev's watch, Georgia has been invaded and Abkhazia and South Ossetia effectively annexed, and Russia has continued to threaten its neighbors and put forward a "new security architecture" whose obvious goal is to undermine NATO's role in Europe.
    • anonymous
       
      Aggressively reclaiming Russia's near abroad is still their aim. Can you blame them? What's important here is that Medvedev really *is* tightly in line with Putin. It's best to think of his presidency as the continuation of the Putin administration, not a thing that's distinct from it.
  • In short, there is little reason to believe that basing a "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations on increased personal ties between presidents Medvedev and Obama will buy Obama any particular advantage. If anything, doing so reinforces Moscow's incentive to continue the "good cop, bad cop" routine.
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    Tagline: "Remember when George W. Bush thought he could get things done by making nice with Vladimir Putin? Barack Obama is repeating the same error with Dmitry Medvedev. " By Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt in Foreign Policy on March 22, 2010
anonymous

Whoa There, Rising Powers! - 0 views

  • Some critics have alleged that the U.S. administration passed up a golden opportunity for peace in a fit of pique at diplomatic interlopers, or that Iran had made painful concessions to fellow emerging nations that it would not make to the West.
  • something important has shifted in the world order, and we will have to get over our flinch reflex. Brazil and Turkey are middle-sized powers -- eighth and 17th in the world, respectively, in GDP -- that live at peace with their neighbors and believe they have a calling to play a role on the global stage.
  • "rhythmic diplomacy," which sounds like jazzercise but in fact, as he put it, "implies active involvement in all international organizations and on all issues of global and international importance."
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  • The Brazils and Turkeys of the world are not likely to form a coherent new bloc, but they will be far less inclined than they were in the past to stay within the lines chalked in by the referees of the West.
  • Partisans of a "concert of democracies" have assumed that maturing democracies in the developing world would seek to advance the same, supposedly universal, values prized by their elders in the West, but it hasn't worked out that way.
  • There's no question that Brazil's interests, or Turkey's, overlap in many places with those of the U.S. and Europe; Turkey seeks nothing more ardently than full EU membership, for instance. But in many other places, interests diverge, and the middle powers are inclined to view the current world order as an instrument to advance Western designs, not theirs.
  • For Obama, the really important question is whether he should reconcile himself to an unavoidable clash of interests with rising powers, or try to win them over by offering a deeper and more substantive kind of engagement -- for example, by pushing for a greater democratization of the institutions from which those states now feel excluded. It may be that the only chance to get Brazil to act more like a global citizen is to treat it like one.
  • When I first read the news about the nuclear deal that Brazil and Turkey reached last week with Iran, I flinched. My reflex reaction was: Third-World troublemakers rally to the side of evil-doer in the face of Western pressure. That was, of course, the wrong reflex.
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    "Brazil and Turkey's diplomatic forays may be annoying, but they also signal a huge shift in the way the world works. Is Obama paying attention?" By James Traub in Foreign Policy on May 25, 2010.
anonymous

David Stockman's Dystopia - 0 views

  • What's more, his perps would have to be held in separate cells, because they're of remarkably different stripes. Milton Friedman is implicated (his sin: advocating managing the money supply), but so is Paul Krugman (and of course his spiritual mentor John Maynard Keynes).  Franklin Roosevelt is on the list of "policy villains," but so is Richard Nixon, who dealt the final blow to the gold standard. Former Reagan economic advisor Art Laffer (Mr. Supply Side) is there, a few names away from Larry Summers (these days, Mr. Demand Side), who served, most recently, as Barack Obama's top economic advisor.
  • So what's the connection? I'll give you a hint: They all advocated economic interventions. They thought they could help boost growth, lower unemployment, raise revenues, stimulate investment, smooth out volatility, and so on. And, as Stockman sees it, the problem is not simply that they all failed miserably. It's that their failure has doomed America.
  • It's easy to poke fun at a rant like this, and most of it is just plain wrong (more on that in a moment). But what's more interesting is to figure out where Stockman is on target.
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  • There are, unquestionably, aspects of American capitalism that have been corrupted -- in no small part through money in politics, something Stockman vividly rails against. He's also right that the U.S. economy is seriously underperforming and bad policy is implicated. One of his hobbyhorses, crony capitalism -- a frequent target of the very progressive economist Dean Baker -- is surely holding back growth, skewing the distribution of income and wealth, and steering investment not toward its most productive uses, but to those most favored by the tax code.
  • Unfortunately, those points are not central to his argument.
  • What Stockman is most worked up about is that for almost a century, economic policymakers have ... um ... made policy, and that's led to cheap money, high indebtedness, and econo-moral turpitude.
  • Stockman insists that the market should work out its failures without all these meddlers trying to fix them (there must be "a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy"); no government investments in industry; central banks shouldn't mess with the money supply, and so on.
    • anonymous
       
      Sigh... standard LP refrain.
  • The reader gets tons of invective against interventionists from FDR to Obama, but never a compelling explanation as to why America would have been better off if we did nothing to lessen the economic pain caused by the Great Depression or the Great Recession by applying Keynesian stimulus. Nor is there any analysis of why mainstream economics is wrong to believe, based on decades of empirical evidence from economies across the globe, that such stimulus, both fiscal and monetary, actually works.
  • Similarly, not only is there absolutely no benefit assigned to any of the Federal Reserve's actions over the years to push back on inflation and joblessness (and no question, they've made mistakes), but Stockman, with apparent ignorance of the historical record, atavistically pines for the gold standard.
  • If you want to get rid of central banks, you'd better come up with some other stabilizing mechanism a whole lot better than gold buggery. And I'm quite certain that would lead you right back to independent central banks.
  • Moreover, sovereign debt is neither bad nor good -- its assessment must be situational. Even a cursory analysis should stress that debt that's paying for inefficient health care is a serious problem. Debt that's financing productivity-enhancing public goods or temporarily offsetting a large demand contraction is a very different story.
  • Stockman never explains how a market failure such as underinvestment in such sectors would be overcome by simply not having the government help directly by subsidizing research and development or backstopping credit to offset the high risk premiums investors would otherwise demand.
  • Instead, we get a "revisionist history of our era," as he puts it, where Keynes and FDR are villains, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge heroes, gold is king, central bankers are legal counterfeiters, and debt is always evil.
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    "Why Reagan's former budget chief is like a crazy person howling in the wind. Let's ignore him."
anonymous

How to Save the Global Economy: Get Better Data - 0 views

  • The Great Moderation was no accident; it was the consequence of the financial institution-building that began at Bretton Woods in 1944. Determined to avoid the devastating economic shocks of the interwar period, a generation of leaders designed a framework of strong institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, that could intervene when market forces alone could not maintain equilibrium.
    • anonymous
       
      This is worth remembering the next time a free-marketeer trumpets how America was some pinaccle of the laisse-faire wet dream before [insert demon here] ruined it.
  • Beneath the calm, though, the growing complexity of the global economy meant that over time, the magnitude and frequency of institutional interventions increased. John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose ideas shaped the postwar economic order, himself never imagined that the powerful tools created in the Bretton Woods system would be used as frequently as they were, and by the early 1970s, more than a few economists began to wonder whether these measures were treating the symptoms of a problem and not its root cause. Perhaps the global economy was not an equilibrium system at all.
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    "The 2008 crash was more than the start of a recession; it represented the end of what economists James Stock and Mark Watson labeled the "Great Moderation," a two-decade period of low business cycle volatility, moderate inflation, moderate unemployment, and steady industrial production. The Great Moderation lulled businesses into reducing their reserves and led some economists to speculate that perhaps we had moved beyond business cycles entirely. As Nobel laureate Robert Lucas proclaimed at the 2003 American Economic Association meeting, the "central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes.""
anonymous

5 Myths About the Chinese Communist Party - 0 views

  • "China Is Communist in Name Only." Wrong. If Vladimir Lenin were reincarnated in 21st-century Beijing and managed to avert his eyes from the city's glittering skyscrapers and conspicuous consumption, he would instantly recognize in the ruling Chinese Communist Party a replica of the system he designed nearly a century ago for the victors of the Bolshevik Revolution. One need only look at the party's structure to see how communist -- and Leninist -- China's political system remains.
  • As in the Soviet Union, the party controls the media through its Propaganda Department, which issues daily directives, both formally on paper and in emails and text messages, and informally over the phone, to the media. The directives set out, often in detail, how news considered sensitive by the party -- such as the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo -- should be handled or whether it should be run at all.
  • Perhaps most importantly, the party dictates all senior personnel appointments in ministries and companies, universities and the media, through a shadowy and little-known body called the Organization Department. Through the department, the party oversees just about every significant position in every field in the country. Clearly, the Chinese remember Stalin's dictate that the cadres decide everything.
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  • "The Party Controls All Aspects of Life in China." Not anymore. No question, China was a totalitarian state under Mao Zedong's rule from 1949 until his death in 1976. In those bad old days, ordinary workers had to ask their supervisors' permission not only to get married, but to move in with their spouses. Even the precise timing for starting a family relied on a nod from on high.
  • "The Internet Will Topple the Party." Nope. Bill Clinton famously remarked a decade ago that the efforts of Chinese leaders to control the Internet were doomed, akin to "nailing Jell-O to a wall." It turns out the former president was right, but not in the way he thought. Far from being a conveyor belt for Western democratic values, the Internet in China has largely done the opposite. The "Great Firewall" works well in keeping out or at least filtering Western ideas. Behind the firewall, however, hypernationalist netizens have a much freer hand.
  • "Other Countries Want to Follow the China Model." Good Luck. Of course, many developing countries are envious of China's rise. Which poor country wouldn't want three decades of 10 percent annual growth? And which despot wouldn't want 10 percent growth and an assurance that he or she would meanwhile stay in power for the long haul? China undoubtedly has important lessons to teach other countries about how to manage development, from fine-tuning reforms by testing them in different parts of the country to managing urbanization so that large cities are not overrun by slums and shantytowns.
  • "The Party Can't Rule Forever." Yes it can. Or at least for the foreseeable future. Unlike in Taiwan and South Korea, China's middle class has not emerged with any clear demand for Western-style democracy. There are some obvious reasons why. All three of China's close Asian neighbors, including Japan, became democracies at different times and in different circumstances. But all were effectively U.S. protectorates, and Washington was crucial in forcing through democratic change or institutionalizing it.
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    "5 Myths About the Chinese Communist Party" - an interesting look at some assumptions that Westerners tend to make, and how they are classically wrong (like so many things we take a magnifying glass to).
anonymous

Oh, That Seventies Feeling - 0 views

  • Historians are finally starting to show that there was a lot more to the “Me Decade” than we might have thought.
  • It's much easier to navigate the cultural and economic upheavals of the 1970s, however, when you take a planet-sized view. That's the approach chosen by the editors of the aforementioned The Shock of the Global, a grab-bag of lively academic essays that covers everything from the proliferation of global non-government organizations to the worldwide women's rights movement to smallpox eradication.
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    Why the 1970s Are Still Haunting Us Today. By Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy on June 1, 2010.
anonymous

What exactly is the blockade of Gaza? - 0 views

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    By Yousef Munayyer at Foreign Policy on June 3, 2010.
anonymous

The Geopolitics of the iPhone - 0 views

  • Five ways Apple's new gadget and its cousins are transforming global politics.
    • anonymous
       
      I'm fascinated by supply chains. Things that we consume - and for granted - can have long, convoluted, socially detrimental effects. Most of our exposure to supply chains relates to pollution and broad-based environmental concerns. When we dig deeper, though, there are powerful connections all over the place.
  • After oil and water, coltan might soon be among the world's most contested resources.
  • Foxconn finally agreed to raise wages 30 percent amid rising criticism over the deaths, but the iPhone maker is only a small part of a larger trend affecting the Chinese labor market.
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  • Cellular service companies make most of their money by hawking contracts, not handsets -- which is why upgrading your phone's hardware every two years can be so easy and cheap.
    • anonymous
       
      Reminds me of our family conversation about July 4th fireworks. You know you're in a liberal family when you wonder about how the money could be better used. But it's not as though life is so reducible. There isn't a fireworks-to-healthcare conversion kit and there are *plenty* of ways that we average citizens could better spend our money.
  • Although it hasn't revolutionized higher education yet, iTunes U holds great promise for remote student learning, especially in regions where access to quality education is limited.
  • Normally, military innovation drives advances in the private market. Take GPS satellite navigation, for instance, or the microwave oven. In the case of smartphones, though, the tables have turned.
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    "Five ways Apple's new gadget and its cousins are transforming global politics." By Brian Fung at Foreign Policy on June 28, 2010.
anonymous

Think Again: Ronald Reagan - 0 views

  • The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.
  • These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.
  • He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.
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  • at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion "scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan," according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley.
  • Reagan's political genius lay in recognizing that what Americans wanted was a president who exorcised the ghost of the Vietnam War without fighting another Vietnam. Although Americans enjoyed Reagan's thunderous denunciations of Central American communism, 75 percent of them, according to a 1985 Louis Harris survey, opposed invading Nicaragua.
  • So Reagan created Potemkin Vietnams. His biographer Lou Cannon calls him "shameless" in using Grenada to revive America's Vietnam-wounded pride. The war resulted in more medals per soldier than any military operation in U.S. history. When he bombed Libya in 1986, Reagan goosed American nationalism again, declaring, "Every nickel-and-dime dictator the world over knows that if he tangles with the United States of America, he will pay a price."
  • Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology.
  • The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.
  • Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power.
  • Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished.
  • In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one.
  • According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."
  • When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands."
  • An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours.
  • By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend."
  • Commentary's Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were "sinking into a state of near political despair."
  • By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that "in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained" than his right-wing supporters had hoped.
  • In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store.
  • Will wrote that he "is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement taken from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' Any time, any place, that is nonsense."
  • the irony is that in Reagan's own "war on terror," his policies more closely resembled Obama's than Bush's.
  • Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.
  • Of course, the 9/11 attacks gave Bush a massive jolt of popularity and sent Congress diving for cover, all of which made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq much easier.
  • For many contemporary conservatives, being a Reagan disciple means acting as if there are no limits to American strength. But the real lessons of Reaganism are about how to wield national power and bolster national pride when your hands are partially tied.
  • That means understanding that America's foreign-policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise.
  • If Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter, if he does not want Americans to equate his restraint with their humiliation, he must be as aggressive as Reagan in finding symbolic ways to soothe Americans' wounded pride.
  • Obama needs to remind Americans that their most successful Cold War presidents -- Reagan included -- saw the conflict as a primarily economic struggle.
  • In the nascent economic and ideological struggle between the United States and China, wars that Washington cannot possibly pay for -- and which leave the country more reliant on foreign central bankers -- don't make America stronger; they make it weaker.
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    By Peter Beinart at Foreign Policy on June 7, 2010. I have always been fascinated by the difference between perception and reality when it comes to Reagan.
anonymous

Gasbags - 0 views

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    "Politicians, oilmen, and green-energy boosters love to invoke the idea of energy security. None of them know what they're talking about." By Michael Levi at Foreign Policy on June 15, 2010.
anonymous

Is China Turning Japanese? - 0 views

  • That's because China's economic growth has followed what's sometimes called "the Japanese model."  In Japan and other Asian countries, this model has proved extraordinarily successful in the short term in generating eye-popping rates of growth -- but it always eventually runs into the same fatal constraints: massive overinvestment and misallocated capital. And then a period of painful economic adjustment. In short: Beijing, beware.
  • The Japanese model channels wealth away from the household sector to subsidize growth by restraining wages, undervaluing the currency, and, most powerfully, forcing down the cost of capital.
  • too much of the economy depends on hidden subsidies to survive. 
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  • Unless domestic consumption expands dramatically, China can continue growing rapidly only by increasing investment well beyond what is economically useful or by forcing larger trade surpluses onto a reluctant world.
  • Many reasons have been given for low Chinese consumption -- demographics, Confucian culture, skewed tax incentives, amateurish marketing, the sex imbalance, the tattered social safety net, etc. If Beijing takes administrative steps to address the correct cause of low consumption, so goes the theory, it will automatically rise.
  • The other, smaller (but rapidly growing) school of thought argues the model itself prohibits high consumption: growth is high because consumption is low.
  • Contrary to conventional thinking, the Chinese have no aversion to consuming. They are eager shoppers, as even the most cursory visit to a Chinese mall will indicate. The problem is that Chinese households own such a small share of total national income that their consumption is necessarily also a small share.
  • One option might be for Beijing to engineer a huge shift of state wealth to the household sector through, say, a massive privatization program.
  • Another option, and ultimately the only sustainable path forward, would involve reversing the subsidies that generated such furious growth.
  • Unfortunately, the longer China waits to make the transition from this model of growth, the more difficult the transition will be.
  • The sooner China begins the difficult transition, the less costly it will be, but in no circumstance is it likely to be easy. They key will be to get consumption to grow quickly relative to GDP, and China might simply not have the time to do it by reversing the wage, currency, and interest-rate subsidies paid by the household sector.
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    "China has formally overtaken Japan as the world's second largest economy. Yet, for all the recent excited commentary, there's less cause for baijiu toasts in Beijing than they might think." By Michael Pettis at Foreign Policy on August 19, 2010.
anonymous

The Spies Were No Joke - 0 views

  • the West would do well to pay attention to just how closely the methods and intentions of Russia's current intelligence agency, the SVR, replicate those of Soviet-era intelligence agencies.
  • the Russian spy ring wasn't an aberration, but a reflection of precisely the way that Putin wants his intelligence agencies to operate.
  • Ultimately, the use of illegals is as much a sign of desperation as of malicious intent. Perhaps the SVR is proud of upholding these traditions, but the U.S. intelligence services should be forgiven for not feeling envious.
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    "Anna Chapman and Co. may have seemed silly, but they were actually carrying out Putin's master plan: re-creating the KGB." By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan at Foreign Policy on July 22, 2010.
anonymous

The Geopolitics of Google Earth - 0 views

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    "It's way beyond crop circles, blood-red lakes in Iraq, and half-hidden UFOs. Officials from Greece to New York to Switzerland are using the free satellite images to find tax cheats with undeclared swimming pools and illegal pot plantations. Armchair cartographers are also getting in on the game, uncovering -- and creating -- political minefields." By Benjamin Pauker at Foreign Policy on August 6, 2010.
anonymous

Against Evil - 0 views

  • it is more likely yet another example of the refusal of liberals to acknowledge the success of Reagan's Cold War policies: first, rebuilding a disastrously diminished security establishment (diplomatic and political as well as military), then challenging the Soviet Union in a way that surely hastened the demise of the "evil empire."
  • What many of us who served in the Reagan administration do argue is that the delegitimization of the Kremlin dictators (accomplished, in part, by what Beinart calls "virulent Cold War rhetoric"), the rebuilding of American military capabilities, and a skillful arms control strategy (that eventuated in Soviet acceptance of Regan proposals they began by categorically rejecting), led to the Western victory in the Cold War.
  • Reagan barely took notice of what was an insignificant "demand" for détente.
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  • Reagan knew what he wanted and he knew how to achieve it. He was rock solid in defining -- and sticking with -- policies he believed were right. This was especially true with respect to arms control, where, often against the advice of the experts, the liberals, and much of the media, Reagan stayed the course until the Soviets gave him the agreement he wanted. 
  • What the article calls Reagan's "sudden infatuation with arms control," is pure invention. Beinart refers to the failure to conclude a U.S.-Soviet arms control treaty in Iceland in 1986 and implies that Reagan, his heart and mind changed by political expediency, had abandoned the tough policies to which he had been committed.
  • But Reagan, following his own beliefs and proceeding in his own way, achieved results no liberal foreign policy has approached -- or is likely to achieve.
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    A rebuttal against Peter Beinart's "Think Again: Ronald Reagan." By Richard Perle at Foreign Policy on July 27, 2010.
anonymous

How do Millennials think about international relations? - 0 views

  • 1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties; 2)  The September 11th attacks; 3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; 4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession; 5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 
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    "I wonder whether the current generation of millennial twentysomethings will develop a worldview about international relations that transcends party and clique. If that happened, it would profoundly shape the contours of American foreign policy starting next decade." By Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy on August 23, 2010.
anonymous

Bury the Graveyard - 0 views

  • Afghanistan, we're told, is "the graveyard of empires."
  • Look, failure is always a possible outcome, especially judging by the way things have been going lately. But if the United States and its allies end up messing up their part of the equation, blame it on their bad policy decisions. Don't blame it on a supersimplified version of Afghanistan's history -- especially if you prefer to overlook the details.
  • One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn't at all borne out by the history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a 'highway of conquest' rather than the 'graveyard of empires,'" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years it was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C."
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  • Alexander's successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years.
  • Genghis had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base.
  • But context is everything. Everyone tends to forget what happened after the rout of the British: In 1842 they invaded again, defeating every Afghan army sent out against them.
  • Britain's foreign-policy aim, which it ultimately achieved, was to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer state outside the influence of imperial competitors, such as the Russians.
  • But even the most skeptical historians concede that, around 1984 or so, the Soviets were actually getting the better of the mujahideen. It was the U.S. decision to send shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan resistance, which robbed the Russian helicopter gunships of their superiority, that allowed the guerrillas to stage a comeback.
  • As Barfield points out, the war against the Soviets was sharply different from previous rebellions in Afghanistan's history as a state, which were relatively fleeting and almost always local affairs, usually revolving around dynastic power struggles. "From 1929 to 1978," he says, "the country was completely at peace."
  • Unfortunately, popular views of the place today are shaped by the past 30 years of seemingly unceasing warfare rather than substantive knowledge of the country's history.
  • Anti-war activists routinely blame the post-2001 Western military presence in the country for the destruction of national infrastructure and the widespread cultivation of opium poppies -- both of which actually date back to the Soviet invasion and the civil war that followed. Others play up the notion of Afghanistan as inherently immune to civilization: "We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency," said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on CNN in 2009. "Afghanistan has probably had - my reading of Afghanistan history - it's probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind."
  • One thing is for sure: If we really want Afghans to attain the future they deserve, clinging to a fake version of their history won't help.
  •  
    "If you want to figure out a way forward for Afghanistan, fake history is not the place to start. " By Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy on July 26, 2010.
anonymous

Exploiting the Flood - 0 views

  • With a humanitarian crisis in Pakistan which dwarfs the combined devastation of the 2004 Asian tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the lack of media attention that the flooding has received is surprising.
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    "Whereas the destruction wrought by the Haitian earthquake, for example, brought millions of dollars in donations as well as public campaigns by prominent American figures to raise money for Haiti's reconstruction, the latest humanitarian crisis in Pakistan has brought little of the same sympathy or support." By Jeb Koogler at Foreign Policy Watch on August 26, 2010.
anonymous

Want to Defuse the Iran Crisis? - 0 views

  •  
    "Sometime in the next few weeks, if the parties can agree on a place and date convenient to all sides, Iran and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, known as the "P5+1," will meet for the first time since October 2009 to revive diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program. This is welcome news for U.S. President Barack Obama who, almost two years into his first term, has learned the hard way that diplomacy with Iran is neither quick nor easy. " By Trita Parsi & Reza Marashi at Foreign Policy at Foreign Policy on November 12, 2010.
anonymous

The Realist Prism: Shaping the Multipolar World - 0 views

  • At first glance, the Obama administration appears to have ruled out the "concert of powers" approach to managing multipolarity. The United States instead remains committed to a 21st-century version of the "Open Door" policy, rejecting anything that would recognize "spheres of influence" or "zones of privileged interests" in the geographic neighborhoods of the other great powers. As Vice President Joe Biden reiterated in Kyiv in July 2009, "We don't recognize, and I want to reiterate this, any spheres of influence." Nor is it likely the current administration would embrace an updated version of Nixon's "regional policemen" idea -- having a major power assume the lead for ensuring stability and security in a specific region of the world.
    • anonymous
       
      Biden's statement is so adorable...
  • Multipolarity is the future, says the U.S. intelligence community, and many serious students of foreign policy tend to agree. But policymakers in Washington don't seem eager to embrace change, or to make the strategic choices that would be needed to guarantee continued U.S. global leadership.
    • anonymous
       
      I am not convinced that global multi-polarity is how the near future will unfold. The author is quite right that there are a *number* of "what if's", but there always are when trying to predict the future. The U.S., for the time being, is still very strong, cultural, militarily, and economically. This is in stark contrast to the perception; that whole American zeitgeist-thing. There is still no indication that China and Russia still be growing in geopolitical significance given all the very large structural problems they are facing. Even so, planners plan for the worst and they SHOULD play for a multi-polar world, which will manifest itself eventually. Unipolarity is the exception, not the rule.
  • U.S. policy seems predicated instead on expecting the rise of other powers to be interrupted, or even reversed. There is some rationale for this approach
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