A CHANGING WORLD — The Trilateral Commission is made up of top leaders in politics, foreign policy, and finance from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan — hence the “tri” in the name. The group has a reputation for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes power in shaping world affairs. Formed during the Cold War, it is traditionally Western in outlook, influential rather than powerful, and discreet more than secretive. The Trilateral Commission emerged into the limelight when president elect Jimmy Carter, himself a member, lifted his foreign policy team wholesale from its ranks, including the former director Zbigniew Brzezinski. Corridors has [...]
On May 30, more than 100 countries meeting in Dublin agreed to the text of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which promises to vastly limit the use of weapons that have led to humanitarian suffering for decades. Spurred on by a February 2007 meeting hosted by Norway, the “Oslo” process has moved remarkably quickly to reach a consensus on dealing with bombs, rockets and artillery shells that disperse submunitions over large areas. These “bomblets” often fail to explode at first and later injure noncombatants, including children attracted to what look like golf balls or ribboned cans. Despite the agreement, short-term [...]
Even those in America who call for a more humble American foreign policy and recognize the need to listen to foreign populations and global public opinion persist in deploying at every possible moment the most patronizing of monikers in describing their preferred allies: “moderate.” Over the past eight years, the condescending label of moderate has been applied to a variety of potential interlocutors in regional conflicts — with never a positive result. Negotiations with so-called “moderate Taliban” proved a failure; Taliban interests and unity certainly outweighed any incentives the U.S.-backed Karzai regime could muster. The much lauded effort in Iraq’s [...]
