Global Archive

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt’s piece in Foreign Affairs. The Economist on sovereign wealth funds, here and here. Watch more World Politics Review video reports in our video section.

Quick morning blog round-up: — Armenia (A Fistful of Euros): “Once you start thinking in terms of agents provocateurs and double motives, suddenly it’s all a hall of mirrors.” — Venezuela (Inside South America): “As a peacemaking tool, indifference could be more effective than diplomacy.” — Iraq (Thomas Barnett): “Yes, there is plenty of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, and especially anti-Bush sentiment. But here’s the deal, there’s no pre-Bush thinking left there.” — Kosovo (Washington Realist): “Perhaps a real surprise for Washington is the “wait-and-see” attitude of the Arab world and the larger Islamic world.” There’s more out there, […]

A month is a long time in the era of online news and opinion, but I just stumbled on a Project on Defense Alternatives monograph from back in February that’s really worth a mention. Carl Conetta makes a pretty convincing argument that the major significance of 9/11 was political, not strategic, and that the true historical pivot point of our time remains the fall of the Soviet Union. Conetta begins with the paradox of American military primacy in the post-Cold War era. This nugget is enough to make any foreign policy writer green with envy: With Soviet collapse, America won […]

HONG KONG — One person who’s not impressed by the field of candidates competing in Saturday’s Malaysian election is former premier Mahathir Mohammad, who lorded over the peninsula with an iron fist and an acid tongue for two decades. Five years after standing down, he says he’s unhappy with the record number of second-generation candidates running for office; but there are exceptions. “I do not want the people to say that I am setting up a dynasty,” he recently told the Bernama news agency. “We should not have a dynasty in our country’s politics.” Nurul Izzah Anwar, the 27-year-old daughter […]

As part of the discussion on nation-building, we thought it might be useful to compare and contrast what the presidential candidates have proposed so far. Similar to what Marc Lynch noted in a post on “public diplomacy” and the “war of ideas”, both John McCain and Barack Obama have offered direct proposals for nation-building, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy outline in Foreign Affairs mentioned the need for diplomacy as part of broader American policy, but nothing concrete in the way of how to shore up failing states. We’ll try to get some comment from the Clinton campaign, […]

My humble contribution to the nation-building discussion thread: At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the United States should be very careful about intervening on the ground in places that are already failed states, or in places where our intervention is likely to hasten a failing state’s descent into failure. This should be the case whether the purpose is ostensibly humanitarian or not — I don’t understand why some who believe Iraq is a disaster want to intervene military in Darfur, for example. In cases where military intervention is necessary to protect U.S. national security interests (narrowly defined), […]

I came across a swirl of articles this week that seem to converge around a theme: At the Globalist, a piece about how the media, by neglecting the major stories coming out of pre-9/11 Afghanistan, contributed to the failure to articulate a coherent American foreign policy in the region. Also at the Globalist, a piece about how we seem to be repeating the same mistake in Somalia as we speak, this time due to a reductionist tendency to view all conflicts therough counter-terrorism. This Foreign Affairs piece on the tenacity of ethno-nationalism as a driving force in regional conflicts for […]

The following articles were the most-read on World Politics Review last month: 1. France and the Middle East: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Nuclear Option2. Corruption and Organized Crime in Kosovo: An Interview with Avni Zogiani3. Spy Satellite’s Scheduled Destruction Raises Concerns About Diplomatic Fallout4. ‘Who Killed Benazir?’: An Interview with Fatima Bhutto5. Can the U.S. Military Sustain Focus on Stability Operations?6. Who Killed Terrorist Mastermind Imad Moughniyah?7. Rights & Wrongs: Feb. 5 Edition8. Kosovo Independence: Making a Bad Situation Worse9. The United Nations’ Unscientific War on Biotechnology10. Beijing and Moscow to Propose Joint Space Treaty

A quick word to Huffington Post readers: The Sam Brannen article Arianna cited is here. The blog post she got the quote from is here. Hope that helps.

In this cleverly snide blog post at Harper’s magazine, Ken Silverstein points out the irony in President Bush criticizing Democratic presidential candidates for offering to talk to tyrants, given some of the autocrats that Bush has met with in the oval office. WPR has no position on the question of meeting with the likes of Ahmadinejad, Castro or others. We would only point out that there is the possibility of a happy medium, depending on the situation, between glad-handing in the Oval Office and closing off all diplomatic channels. And yet, as the photo evidence indicates, African heads of state, […]

A quick word to Huffington Post readers: The Sam Brannen article Arianna cited is here. The blog post she got the quote from is here. Hope that helps.