WPR Blog Archive

This week’s must-read piece on U.S. foreign policy is Jonathan Rauch’s “Export Security, Not Democracy” (link will expire Feb. 8) in the Feb. 1 issue of National Journal. Rauch takes a cue from Amitai Etzioni’s book “Security First” (he also cites Larry Diamond’s latest), in arguing that “basic security,” not democracy, should be at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Not only does basic security rest “on the deepest and most universal of moral foundations, respect for human life and repudiation of deadly violence,” but it also addresses a tragic irony of current U.S. foreign policy: that American-style democracy offends […]

We like to do all we can to highlight the work of World Politics Review contributors — even when that work appears elsewhere. To that end, we’ll begin posting links to WPR contributors’ writings in other outlets in this space. If you’re a WPR contributor, email us with links for this feature: –Luke Hunt wrote about Vietnamese spy Pham Xuan An for World Politics Review shortly after An’s death in 2006. In the latest issue of The Correspondent, the monthly magazine of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Hunt reviews “Perfect Spy,” a book on An by Larry Berman. —Kelly […]

The present author well remembers a discussion that took place in a London home in 2005. The topic was bias in the British media and whether it could not perhaps affect the British public’s perception of international matters such as the Iraq War or the Middle East conflict. The conversation had already become somewhat heated when my host — a longtime Labor Party activist and advisor to the British government — suddenly exclaimed: “We have our BBC!” The objectivity of “our” BBC being apparently beyond doubt and my interlocutor, in a similarly proprietary spirit, having only shortly before reminded me […]

The Washington Post’s PostGlobal has just begun another video reporting project called “Islam’s Advance,” a (curiously named?) effort meant “to challenge our perceptions of Islam as a monolithic and extremist creed, and to look for answers to some of the most important questions facing the world today: how is Islam adapting to the demands of the 21st century? What can the religion do to reform from within? And how do those tensions play themselves out in the lives of ordinary Muslims?” The project is helmed by Jack Fairweather, who will travel in the Middle East and Central Asia as a […]

It has often been pointed out that Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna: the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pivotal organization in the history of Islamic fundamentalism. And it has at least just as often been pointed out that this should not matter, since, after all, no one chooses their parents and grandparents. In a debate with Tariq Ramadan on the French public television channel France 3 last Wednesday, the Franco-Tunisian author Abdelwahab Meddeb posed what is the real question in this connection: Is Tariq Ramadan faithful to the legacy of his grandfather’s ideas? Below is a […]