The Politics of Human Trafficking
Ursula Plassnik
On the Newsstand:Foreign Policy
How the Taliban Came Back
And what it may mean for the U.S. strategic dilemma With fraud-ridden elections, a growing insurgency, and expanding Taliban influence, Afghanistan is at its most critical crossroads since the overthrow of the fundamentalist regime eight years ago. A report leaked last month revealed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, has requested 40,000 ... Read More
In Need of Assistance
Reforming foreign aid at home In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush made a sweeping commitment to global economic development. In early 2002, he declared, “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror. We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right to human dignity.” Development was to be a vital ... Read More
Ghosts of Peace Prizes Past
Obama would do well to learn from the post-Oslo experiences of two other Presidents The Nobel Prize Committee’s recent decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama touched off a firestorm across the world. Reactions have ranged from rancor from much from the right wing for the supposed lack of justification, to delight from the American left and ... Read More
A History Lesson for President Obama
What 44 can learn from 35 Pundits are fond of drawing comparisons between John F. Kennedy and Barack H. Obama and, indeed, there are many parallels to be found. Like JFK, Obama captured national attention as a junior senator and ran for president without a great deal of governing experience. Like JFK, Obama campaigned as a liberal Democrat committed to ... Read More
Things to Come
George Friedman’s geopolitical prophecy The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century is a book that admits it will not get everything right. The author George Friedman, founder of the private intelligence firm STRATFOR, takes up the prophet’s mantle and tells us what the 21st century might look like. His contentions seem, at first glance, fantastic: in 2050, ... Read More
More Secretary than General?
Ban Ki-moon’s first two years at the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations, has cultivated many nicknames over the course of his long and illustrious career as a diplomat. As the foreign minister of South Korea, he was called Ban-chusa, a moniker meaning both “bureaucrat” and “administrative-clerk.” His colleagues in the ministry praised him for ... Read More
Showdown in Sri Lanka
The Sri Lankan government is about to liquidate the last remaining holdout of the Tamil Tigers. Their stalemate of a year ago has been broken, and the Tigers are down to apparently a mere four square miles on the coast of Sri Lanka. With fifty thousand civilian hostages being used as human shields, it’s hardly surprising that the Sri Lankan ... Read More
Connecting to Cuba
America’s policies towards Cuba have been total, unmitigated failures, so it’s really good to see Obama making some important, initial changes. The entire premise of our embargo — that isolation will weaken the regime, which in turn will trigger an overthrow — is based on a major fallacy. In reality, isolation strengthens authoritarian regimes. It shields them from international forces ... Read More
No Nukes, Please.
It would be a pity to let go without comment Obama’s recent speech in Prague. For those of you who didn’t follow it (the North Korean missile launch an hour before somewhat overshadowed it), it was surprisingly consequential. A decent number of commentators dismissed it, echoing Slate’s Anne Applebaum in critiquing Obama’s “odd obsession with universal nuclear disarmament”. It’s interesting ... Read More
Re: Liberal Realism
So I happened to notice the Debbie Downer note of Elise’s last post, and I wanted to focus specifically on the question of whether “it jibes with even his progressive values to stand for one set of rights at home and another one abroad.” That’s actually not a helpful way to phrase the question, for it elides the disconnect between ... Read More
