Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

In January 1980, U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would protect “the free movement of Middle East oil”—with military force, if necessary. For decades, this commitment has stirred remarkably little controversy. But the world has changed dramatically since Carter’s declaration. Is Persian Gulf oil still worth defending with American military might?

It is easy to conclude that the U.S. Congress, deeply partisan and paralyzed by gridlock, is simply incapable of playing a constructive role in matters of war and peace. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and indeed, it wasn’t always. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, Congress weighed in responsibly on conflicts in Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, and southern Africa. Now is the perfect time for congressional leaders to breathe new life into an essential component of American democracy.

The Obama administration’s decision to remove most sanctions on Myanmar presents an opportunity to refocus US attention and help Aung San Suu Kyi meet her most serious challenges.

A father’s letters to his son explore some of the questions the son will face growing up, along with a range of possible answers. A generation of Muslims should realize that they have the right—and the obligation—to think about and decide what is right and what is wrong, what is Islamic and what is peripheral to the faith.

Some foreign policy decisions hang like albatrosses around the necks of the states that made them. For the United States, the war in Iraq offers the prime example of a costly and seemingly irreversible blunder. For Europe, it is the adoption of the euro. Fifteen years ago, when the EU established its single currency, European leaders promised higher growth due to greater efficiency and sounder macroeconomic policies, greater equality between rich and poor countries within a freer capital market.

In 1713, King Vakhtang VI of Georgia sent his former teacher, the famed polymath and writer Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, to France and Italy on an urgent diplomatic mission. Squeezed on all sides - by the Persian Empire to the southeast, the Ottoman Empire to the southwest, and Russia to the north - Georgia needed Western allies. Orbeliani seemed the perfect choice to petition the French monarch and the pope, the power brokers of the time, for help.

It has been more than seven years since US President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13491, banning the US government’s use of torture. Obama’s directive was a powerful rebuke to the Bush administration, which had, in the years after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the CIA and the US military to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” in questioning suspected terrorists.

As the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the right-wing French political party the National Front, Marine Le Pen grew up in politics, starting to campaign with her father at 13. Trained as a lawyer, she won her first election in 1998, as a regional councilor, and in 2011, she succeeded her father as party leader. She soon distanced herself from his more extreme positions, and eventually - after he reiterated his claim that the Holocaust was a "detail" of history - she expelled him from its ranks.

In January 2015, after jihadists attacked the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, European leaders linked arms to lead a procession of millions through the French capital, chanting “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) in an expression of solidarity with the victims and contempt for their killers. Muslims all over the world also condemned the attacks, as did a number of Islamist organizations, including perhaps the most influential one - the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Just before 11 PM on Thursday, July 14, a 19-ton truck turned onto a seaside promenade in Nice, France, where crowds had gathered to watch Bastille Day fireworks. The truck sped up, plowing into the people on the promenade. By the time French police shot the driver, the truck had traveled 1.1 miles, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more.

Transparency has long been a rare commodity in international affairs. But today, the forces of technology are ushering in a new age of openness that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Governments, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can now harness a flood of open-source information, drawn from commercial surveillance satellites, drones, smartphones, and computers, to reveal hidden activities in contested areas - from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea.

By now, the details of Apple’s fight with the FBI are well known: the FBI wants access to an iPhone belonging to the deceased terrorism suspect Syed Farook, who was involved in the San Bernardino, California, attack on December 2, 2015. Farook’s iPhone is encrypted, so the FBI wants Apple to issue a tailored software update that would allow it to bypass the encryption. Apple has refused to write special software that would eliminate its security protections.

The embassy, at least in its traditional form, is facing an existential crisis. The global transformations of the twenty-first century have dramatically changed the way nations practice diplomacy. The rise of digital communications, diminishing resources, and growing security threats all raise the question of whether the traditional embassy is still relevant.

The modern Middle East has rarely been tranquil, but it has never been this bad. Full-blown civil wars rage in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Nascent conflicts simmer in Egypt, South Sudan, and Turkey. Various forms of spillover from these civil wars threaten the stability of Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia have risen to new heights, raising the specter of a regionwide religious war.

The downing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last October, for which the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility, may ultimately prove more consequential than the horrific attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, that followed. Western security officials had long worried that their countries’ own citizens would conduct attacks after returning home from Iraq or Syria or strike out as “lone wolf” terrorists.

In the Internet age, the world feels far smaller than it used to. But many Americans still know little about the rest of the world and may be more detached from it than ever. Such a lack of awareness is, in certain respects, understandable. Once the Cold War ended, some 25 years ago, Congress, perhaps out of a false sense of security, cut the foreign affairs budget, which led to the closing of some U.S. overseas posts.

The two economic developments that have garnered the most attention in recent years are the concentration of massive wealth in the richest one percent of the world’s population and the tremendous, growth-driven decline in extreme poverty in the developing world, especially in China. But just as important has been the emergence of large middle classes in developing countries around the planet.

What determines whether attempts at democratic transitions will be successful? Past experience offers some insights. We conducted extended interviews with 12 former presidents and one former prime minister who played vital roles in the successful democratic transitions of Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, and Spain. Some were leaders in authoritarian regimes who nevertheless helped steer their countries toward effective democracy.

An Islamic State for the internet age.

Paternalism and the pitfalls of behavioral economics.