US Foreign Policy

Their meeting made for some uncomfortable visuals as Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf defended a national law that criminalized homosexuality in front of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, long an advocate for gay rights, who was visiting Liberia in his capacity as the founder of the African Governance Initiative (AGI), a nonprofit dedicated to building the capacity of African governments.  But the terse exchange masked a deeper, more serious question: should Western leaders try to impose their mora

The rhetoric coming out of the Republican presidential primary candidates would have you believe that President Barack Obama is actively engaged in a foreign policy whose sole purpose is to weaken America's standing on the global stage.  This is, of course, nonsense.  But it also hides the fact that Obama has been rather consistently engaged in a foreign policy strategy followed by the hero of the Republican Right, Ronald Reagan, who himself was following a policy originally laid down by Pres. Harry S Truman.

Former Bush Administration official Elliott Abrams has taken to the pages of Foreign Policy to offer a defense of the Neoconservative policies that were a hallmark of the Bush-era world view, and to link them with the ongoing Arab Spring movement (note: author/pundit Niall Ferguson was also pushing this argument on Sunday's episode of “Fareed Zakaria GPS”).  It is an odd defense on the part of Abrams, since he basically boils neoconservativism down to a couple of pro-de

Ultima Ratio Regum Latin for “[War,] the last argument of kings,” this quote summed up the classical approach to warfare, that it was the method of achieving a specific strategic goal of the realm when other methods had failed. In modern times though, it seems that war is often the result of a chain of political miscalculations by heads of state. Such is the situation with Iran and the United States, where armed conflict seems more and more likely the eventual outcome of our current diplomatic standoff.

[continued from Part 2] Despite the many good things in politics and society accomplished by the Sandinistas, one cannot claim that Nicaragua is a paragon of democracy and modernity—far from it.

The Second Congo War, which gripped the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the turn of the new millennium (1998-2003), is sometimes also called the Great African War or Africa's World War.  The reason is simple, at the height of the hostilities, the armies of no less than eight nations were directly involved in combat, along with two dozen foreign-backed militias, ranging from independence-minded ethnic movements to the nihilistic death cult, the Lord's Resistance Army.  As one would expect from such a multi-faceted conflict, the reasons behind the war are both numerous and complex, but for some of the belligerents, the Great War of Africa allowed f

by Franz-Stefan Gady 

What does it mean to create a society? To be in a society? Nicaraguan poet and former Sandinista revolutionary, Gioconda Belli, writes in her page-turning memoir, The Country under My Skin, about traveling to once-forbidden sites in Managua in the days immediately following the fall of Anastasio Samoza’s regime:

BEIJING - I was trying to clean up my USB drive last night, and I came across a powerpoint presentation about September 11^th, 2001 that a co-worker gave me to use in class. I completely forgot about it. Being here in Beijing on the 10^th anniversary, September 11^th 2011, was not much different than July 4^th, 2011 for me, another day on the calendar. For me September 11^th, 2001 is the day my roommates went to donate blood, security guards asked for Ids to enter campus and LAX went silent, sans the blood plane at midnight.

Recently two of my colleagues at The Mantle asked why the international community was not intervening in ongoing humanitarian crises in different parts of the world.