Dr. Rajiv Shah is the new chief of the United States Agency for International Development. The thirty-six-year-old will take his position at the head of USAID at a time when President Obama is looking to expand the role of the agency, hoping to fight the proliferation of terrorism with development and aid. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports.
Thanks to the recent global financial crisis, we’ve heard much talk about the coming “de-globalization,” defined by some as the reversal of the now decades-long push to further integrate trade among national economies by disintegrating production and spreading its means across the planet to the cheapest sources. In the past, all forms of growing supply chain connectivity could be justified on price, buttressed by just-in-time delivery capacity. But the market woes of the last year-and-a-half supposedly threw all that logic into question. Price risk is one thing, supply risk quite another. Specialization depends on supply: the greater the specialization, the […]
The chaos in Copenhagen offered a powerful, and sobering, illustration of how far the world’s governments are from negotiating an accord to bring climate change under control. Those who believe that a robust and binding climate framework is essential have been left depressed and demoralized. Many now fear that a global governance system that is unable to respond to one of the toughest threats the world faces must, in fact, be broken. History suggests (.pdf) that the climate change priesthood will soldier on, insisting that a deal needs just one more push. Meanwhile, they’ll bury the process ever further in […]
President Barack Obama speaks after having received the completedsecurity review that he ordered after the attempted Christmas dayterrorist attack. As he has mentioned in previous speeches since theattempted attack, Obama says that the intelligence community was notaggressive enough in their intelligence gathering, failed to connectthe dots in analysis, and must correct shortcomings in thewatch-listing system. “We must follow the leads that we get,” hesaid. Here are some reactions from a NewsHour panel. Panelists were both impressed by the frank, candid nature in which the president laid out the facts to the public and surprised by the major holes in the […]
A year ago, Christian Brose penned a provocative article for Foreign Policy entitled “George W. Obama.” In it, the former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice asserted that “Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term” during the 2008 election, rather than the Bush foreign policy of the second term. Moreover, of the latter, he predicted that Obama would “largely continue it.” In large measure, Brose has turned out to be right. Despite the rhetoric of “change we can believe in,” there has been a high degree of continuity between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Take the most […]
I remember catching this one with some high school pals in an all-but-empty Times Square theater back when it was first released. Of course, back then, Times Square was still Times Square, which is to say you could still, um, treat your chemo-related nausea in a movie theater. Contrary to what some of my friends maintain, that does not explain my undying love for this flick. It actually happens to be one of the greatest B-movies ever made — and I’m something of a B-movie buff. There’s at least two doctoral dissertations waiting to be written on it, one on […]
Here are a few of this week’s highlights from WPR’s video section: – As Yemen’s stability comes into question, experts identify more than just Al Qaida as a threat to the crumbling nation. WorldFocus interviews military analyst Anthony Cordesman about the U.S. role in Yemen in this video. – Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to be plagued by ethnic tensions. WorldFocus talks about the issues with Ivana Howard of the National Endowment for Democracy in this video. – The Afghan parliament turned down a majority of President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet picks, but is this a step backward or forward for democracy […]
U.S. President Barack Obama has proclaimed January 2010 to be National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month and called for greater public awareness of the problem. An estimated 27 million people worldwide are trapped as victims of human trafficking, according to Not for Sale, an anti-slavery advocacy group. The black market slave trade is lucrative, worth an estimated $9 billion a year, according to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We must join together as a nation and global community to provide . . . safe haven by protecting victims and prosecuting traffickers,” Obama said in the official proclamation, so […]
There is an ongoing dialogue here at WPR centering on subject tags for our stories. The utilitarian function of these tags is so that readers can quickly find content relating to their interests. But as we try to narrow complex issues down to easily searchable one- and two-word topics, we often find ourselves grappling with questions of politics and geopolitics. The question popped up once again today, triggered by Frida Ghitis’ column on Iran sanctions: Should stories on Iran’s nuclear program be placed in the “WMD” category or the “Energy” category? Although the column doesn’t really call for one or […]
I’m glad Graeme Dobell at the Interpreter flagged this Newsweek joint interview with Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger, because it’s a pretty fascinating discussion of the mechanics of the job, sprinkled with a healthy dose of the mental preparation that goes into it as well. One thing that caught my eye was the list of long-term trend lines that Clinton mentioned watching, issues about which regular readers of WPR will be pretty well-informed: food security (here and here, for instance), the geopolitics of the Arctic (here and here), global health governance, and EU energy policy. Nice to see that the […]
A Dutch man was the first person to take advantage of a change in U.S. policy removing travel restrictions for individuals with HIV/AIDS, after the ban was lifted Monday. Rights advocates and the United Nations applauded the move, as well as a similar one by South Korea, while calling for 57 other countries with various restrictions in place to follow suit. “We’re very excited to finally see the end of this discriminatory and harmful policy. Getting rid of the HIV ban has been a part of our core mission since we were founded in 1994,” Victoria Neilson, legal director at […]
Over the New Year’s holiday, the Chinese government launched yet another trial balloon to test international reaction to its expanding military reach. The move came in the form of an interview reproduced by the Defense Ministry’s Web site, in which a retired admiral called for China to acquire its first permanent overseas naval base. Although the ministry quickly distanced itself from the proposal, we can expect to see further expressions of Chinese interest in acquiring naval bases in coming years. On Dec. 30, the Defense Ministry’s Web site posted the interview with Adm. Yin Zhuo, who often comments on China’s […]
Political pundits across America seem committed to the notion that our just-concluded decade deserves the moniker “worst ever,” with the formulations ranging from Time’s demonic “decade from hell” to Paul Krugman’s self-flagellating “Big Zero.” But if Krugman could call it “a decade in which nothing good happened,” much of the planet might find our myopic bitterness a bit much — as if the entire world should stop spinning just because the Dow Jones Industrial Average forgot to exit the decade higher than when it entered. Why are we so convinced that the last 10 years, the decade of the Naughts, […]
I feel a bit remiss to have checked out so abruptly, and not to have managed even a holiday greetings or New Year’s post. Truth is, I just managed to get all the pre-holiday loose ends tied up before rushing out the door for a long flight (Paris-L.A., non-stop). And despite my best intentions, once I made it to the City of Angles, I found it harder to cross back over that work-vacation divide than I’d expected. So along with my apologies, please accept my belated best wishes for peace, health and prosperity in 2010. I also feel like I […]
During the holiday season, pundits traditionally pen their “end of year” assessments of a presidential administration. Some even assign a grade, as if foreign policy can be reduced to a kind of schoolwork assignment. But instead of grading the performance of the president and his team over the past year, I’d rather take a look at the environment in which his administration must operate after the New Year. And for President Barack Obama, 2010 is going to be a challenging year indeed. First, Obama can no longer offer himself the breathing room represented by “policy reviews” used to assess what […]