Apparently, containment of Iran is no longer an option and the Obama administration is showing signs of toughening its stance. In doing so, the administration appears to be shifting the anticipated costs and benefits (and the likelihood) of military strikes on...
Quoting an anonymous former military intelligence officer, that is how Adam Swerer described the Wikileaks' archive published Sunday in an op-ed earlier this week. Joshua Foust concurred in a PBS...
Yesterday the General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution declaring “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of the...
The Washington Post calls this one of the ten worst campaign attack ads of all time (ranked 2nd behind Daisy Girl). Hmmm, I actually thought it made a good point -- and certainly summed up...
Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to criticize J-list about the alleged groupthink problem: What I meant to say, and evidently didn’t say very effectively, is that JList is inevitable. So...
In 2008, after kicking around the idea for a couple of years, the US formally proposed to create Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) in remote parts of Pakistan (FATA, NWFP, earthquake affected areas of Kashmir, a part of Balochistan province) and all of Afghanistan. The idea was modeled on the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) preferential free trade agreement set up to help forge a liberal-economic peace between Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and the neighboring Arab states.QIZThe 2004 Egyptian-Israeli QIZ agreement, which I researched extensively while I was teaching at the...
My colleague, Ben O’Loughlin at Royal Holloway, has written a blog post on the potential consequences of states in the West, particularly the US and UK, increasingly relying on informal social networking of its citizens to promote foreign policy priorities. This would be a move away from the kind of ham-fisted attempts at public diplomacy seen in the wake of 9/11 aimed at getting Arab states to “like” the west to allowing every day citizens to debate the international issues of the day.Thus, “The War on Terror” becomes the “The Long Change” – or changing people’s minds.However, Ben points...
Just in case you were in suspense, the ICJ has declared that Kosovo's declaration of independence to be legal. Unsurprisingly, the Kosovars are happy, the Serbs are not happy and countries with independence movements are probably a bit more nervous. As the Guardian reports:The ruling is expected to have profound ramifications on the wider international stage, bolstering demands for recognition by territories as diverse as Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria.Still, it was unlikely that a negative ruling would have meant the end of such...
Although the story has garnered relatively little attention in the US, the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) is probably one of the most important developments impacting the medium-term economic and political health of Afghanistan. As the US State Department correctly noted,"This agreement is one of the most important, concrete achievements between the two neighbors in 45 years and represents the most significant bilateral economic treaty ever signed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will undoubtedly bring great benefit to the people of both countries and is also a...
A couple of thoughts on Dana Priest and William Arkin's series that began in the Washington Post yesterday. First, this is the type of story that is all but non-existent in our non-stop 24-hour news cycles -- a two-year investigative report that pulls together thousands of bits and pieces of information and carefully assembles them to tell the bigger story of where we have traveled in the past decade. (I see that the story actually bumped CNN's coverage of Sara Palin's last tweet...) (Update: My bad -- the Post actually featured Palin's last tweet above the Top Secret America in the...
Last month during the Greece/South Korea World Cup game, my eight-year-old son noticed the players speaking to one another in English, and asked me: “Mom, is English the official language of soccer?” As with so many of his astute little queries, I didn’t know the answer at the time. But while in Asia, I read three fabulous books that kept bringing me back to this question and finally not only answered it, but helped me see why it matters.First: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer: sort of an empirical, if anecdotal, validation of FIFA’s claim...
Before departing on vacation, Stephen Walt posted about a rift between South Korea and the United States concerning spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. The U.S. is opposed, primarily because plutonium is a byproduct, while South Korea wants to reprocess waste so as to reduce the volume of nuclear refuse from its large-scale atomic energy program.To reduce proliferation fears inherently tied to plutonium production, South Korean policy in this area reflects a pledge (and as Walt notes, implicit threat), that "We will never build nuclear weapons as long as the United States keeps its alliance...