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 [...]
The EU has a lot riding on passage of the Treaty of Lisbon by all its member states. The future of Europe as a strategic actor on the global stage depends on coming up with some sort of solution to the EU’s institutional crisis, and its unlikely that the consensus that Lisbon represents will be reproduced anytime soon. The problem, as with the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, is that in at least several countries, elite opinion on the matter is out ahead of popular resentment towards “Brussels” (the idea, more than the place). Twenty-six of Europe’s member nations have gotten around [...]
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 [...]
