The Americas Archive

It was all smiles and friendly talk of brotherhood and shared destiny at the presidential palace in Caracas yesterday, as the leaders of Colombia and Venezuela met to reaffirm their commitment to fully restore diplomatic ties and put recent bitter disputes behind them. The two neighboring Andean nations began work to restore broken relations shortly after Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos took office in August. “We are determined that no one or anything will derail us,” said Santos during his second meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez since August. “We’ve gone from good-intentioned statements to concrete accords,” he added. The […]

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s midterm elections, President Barack Obama again sounded the theme of bipartisan cooperation, speaking of the need to find “common ground” and calling on both Democrats and Republicans to unite around solving the country’s pressing challenges. In theory, bipartisanship is a golden rule when it comes to foreign policy, where politics is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. That notion was first articulated by a Republican, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who at the outset of the Cold War, under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman, argued that America’s position in the world would be weakened […]

On the same day that voters in the United States went to the polls to throw a punch into the gut of the political establishment, some 5,000 miles away, police in Greece had their hands full with a series of bombs mailed to foreign embassies. Greek investigators say the bombs, 11 of them in all, were probably the work of militant activists who, in their own violent way and to a much greater degree, also aimed to overturn the political and economic order. In recent months, angry efforts to take on the system have gained steam throughout the developed world […]