Global Archive

Today’s selection was oddly enough almost last week’s selection, but I decided that it didn’t have enough to do with foreign affairs to really warrant using it. Then this week, I saw its most famous lyric referenced three times: by Cheryl Rofer in a post on North Korea, by Tom Ricks in a post on Pakistan, and by Matthew Yglesias in a post on, well, partisan domestic politics. But you get the picture. The fact that I just saw Kris Kristofferson — albeit overdubbed in French — in Sam Pekinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid a few days ago […]

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the State Department is engaging the public “through Facebook and Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.” It’s all part of what she calls 21st century statecraft.

Today’s selection comes from Pat Martino, the man I consider to be the gold standard of jazz guitarists and — as my guitar teacher’s teacher — my musical Godfather. The song itself came to me as I was running alongside the river, thinking about nothing in particular. But it seems to wordlessly express the feeling I get from President Barack Obama’s first months in office, with the composition’s speed and momentum that comes of leaning into the rhythm broken up by the stops and starts and broken stride of its quirky, halting middle section. The quintessential recording of this comes […]

Summer is the tourist season on the southern Italian coastline, but these days its also high season for the illegal immigrants who set off in thousands from Libya. The governments of Italy and neighboring Malta — 60 miles from Italy — have recently been bickering over which of these two EU countries should assume responsibility for receiving the boat people who often arrive bedraggled and near starvation, in leaking boats that barely survive the crossing. Last year, 35,000 illegal immigrants managed to reach the island of Lampedusa, the first point of contact with Italy — a 75 percent increase over […]

Today’s selection began with a reference to the Falklands War in this video that Andrew Sullivan posted. That got me looking for a good video of the Madness song, Blue Skinned Beast, which turned out to be pretty fruitless. A few random associations later and that had become any good reference to Thatcher-era England. And for reasons that I can’t fully explain, because there are other candidates that might seem more obvious, that led me straight to Linton Kwesi Johnson. The poem on which the song is built takes the form of a letter home from a young Carribean man […]

We’re very happy to introduce WPR’s newest regular columnist, Thomas P.M. Barnett,appearing every Monday beginning next week. Most of you are probablyalready familiar with Barnett’s work, but for those of you who aren’t,you’re in for a real treat. In addition to being a New York Timesbest-selling author and a sought-after public speaker, Barnett is achallenging and iconoclastic thinker, who combines intellectualcreativity with clarity of analysis. The result is a far-reachingvision of U.S. grand strategy that somehow manages to be bothprovocatively novel and intuitively obvious at the same time. If youlike big ideas, you’ll like Barnett’s column, The New Rules. We’re […]

We’re very happy to introduce WPR’s newest regular columnist, Thomas P.M. Barnett, appearing every Monday beginning next week. Most of you are probably already familiar with Barnett’s work, but for those of you who aren’t, you’re in for a real treat. In addition to being a New York Times best-selling author and a sought-after public speaker, Barnett is a challenging and iconoclastic thinker, who combines intellectual creativity with clarity of analysis. The result is a far-reaching vision of U.S. grand strategy that somehow manages to be both provocatively novel and intuitively obvious at the same time. If you like big […]

In case you enter the site through the blog, I just wanted to call your attention to the latest WPR feature issue, “The Curtain Rises: Obama’s Opening Act,” that just went live on the front page. Although the articles themselves are behind our subscription firewall, you can still sign up for a free trial here. The difference between our “105 Days” rundown and other “100 Day” collections you might have seen is more than just the five days. It’s the five contributors: Thomas P.M. Barnett, Steve Clemons, Anthony Cordesman, Nikolas Gvosdev and Joshua Muravchik. Between them, they offer a breadth […]

Today’s selection is a movie scene, since this week saw a bunch of foreign policy bloggers come up with their Top Ten lists of films that “tell us something about international relations more broadly,” as Stephen Walt, who kicked things off, put it. Sam Roggeveen came up with his list here, and has the rest of the links as well. If the criteria didn’t include being a good film, I’d have mentioned the Lord of the Rings, essentially the story of building ad hoc alliances in a world where multilateral institutions have fallen into decline. And if you could somehow […]