Content Type: Journal Article / Political Geography: America / Publication Year: within 25 Years / Journal:

701. Volume 1, Issue 11 - Full Issue

Publication Date:: 10-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: CTC Sentinel
Institution:: The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Abstract:: One of the most striking aspects of operations in Iraq during the “surge” of 2007 was the growing tribal uprising against al-Qa`ida. In late 2006 and 2007, this uprising began to transform the war. I spent considerable time on the ground throughout May and June 2007 in Baghdad and the surrounding districts working with U.S. and Iraqi units, tribal and community leaders and fighters engaged in the uprising. Listening to them talk, watching their operations and participating in planning and execution alongside American commanders supporting them provided insight into their motivations and thought processes. Moreover, during this process of participant observation I was able to gather some field data on the relationship between globally-oriented terrorists in Iraq (primarily al-Qa`ida) and the locally-focused militants who found themselves fighting as “accidental” guerrillas in the early part of the war, only to turn against the terrorists in 2007.
Topic:: Terrorism and War
Political Geography:: United States, Iraq, America, and Baghdad

702. Online Exclusive: On U.S. Plans to Deploy ABM Systems in Europe and Possible Compromise Solutions

Author:: Petr B. Romashkin and Pavel S. Zolotarev
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: The current state of Russian-American relations in the area of missile defense—specifically the proposed placement of U.S. missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic—cannot be evaluated without taking a retrospective look at the problem. The past has an appreciable impact on the present and future.
Topic:: Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:: Russia, United States, America, Europe, and Poland

703. Common Values and Common Interests? The Bush Legacy in US-Turkish Relations

Author:: Mark R. Parris
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Insight Turkey
Institution:: SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:: American and Turkish leaders typically describe ties between the U.S. and Turkey as based on “common values and interests.” Yet given that the Bush administration's relationship with Turkey has been marked by dysfunction and crisis, is that still true? A tendency to see Turkey as a function of Washington's big idea of the moment, insensitivity to a broadening perception in Turkey of U.S. disregard for Turkish interests, inaction in the face of PKK terror, weak leadership on energy security, and schizophrenia toward Turkey's internal politics have left U.S.–Turkish relations worse than when George W. Bush came to office. If U.S. and Turkish interests remain largely convergent at the strategic level, a more independent Turkish diplomacy will likely be part of the Bush legacy. As for “common values,” there is reason to hope that the real damage done to mutual perceptions is reversible.
Political Geography:: America, Washington, and Turkey

704. The Concept of Appeal in International Dispute Settlement

Author:: Noemi Gal-Or
Publication Date:: 02-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: The WTO Appellate Body represents an innovation in international law in that an international adjudication authority now operates as a final instance to hear appeals arising from international arbitral (panel) procedures. It is thereby strongly emulating domestic appellate courts without, however, possessing the characteristics that make appellate courts the institutions of justice that they are. Following this trend in a cutting-edge fashion are several other inter-governmental arrangements that had been either concluded (Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Olivos Protocol in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur)) or proposed (the US Congresses' 2002 Trade Promotion Authority Act, the ICSID Discussion Paper of 22 October 2004, the third draft Free Trade Area for the Americas). They embrace the concept of a permanent international instance for appeal from arbitral awards, particularly regarding investment agreements including also disputes arising between the state (public) and the individual legal person (private).
Topic:: International Law and World Trade Organization
Political Geography:: America

705. Import, Export, and Regional Consent in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Author:: Gerald L. Neuman
Publication Date:: 02-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has elaborated a significant body of human rights jurisprudence through interpretation of regional human rights conventions and the adaptation of European and global precedents and global soft law. The Inter-American Court has also aspired to influence outside its region by offering innovative interpretations of human rights and by identifying norms as jus cogens. The Court's methodology in recent years has appeared to give insufficient consideration to the consent of the regional community of states as a factor in the evolutive interpretation of a human rights treaty. The article illustrates and criticizes that trend, and contends that greater attention to indicia of regional consent could improve the acceptance and effectiveness of the inter-American human rights system.
Topic:: Human Rights
Political Geography:: America and Europe

706. Building Counter-Terrorism Capacity Across Borders: Lessons from the Defeat of "Revolutionary Organization November 17th"

Author:: Christos Floros and Bruce Newsome
Publication Date:: 07-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of Security Sector Management
Institution:: Centre for Security Sector Management
Abstract:: Since 2001, governments have made more resources available for building counter-terrorist capacity abroad, but performance has not matched the rhetoric. Lessons from the defeat of the November 17th terrorist organization in Greece suggest that political or material commitments are necessary but insufficient conditions of international counter-terrorist capacity-building. More important, but less acknowledged, are the organizational conditions. Governments should encourage more cooperative, less self-reliant cultures in their agencies, develop multi-laterally beneficial objectives, and prohibit activities unauthorised by the host country. Some of the lessons, such as adherence to the same rules of law by all stakeholders, confirm norms in security sector reform. Others, such as increased security sector powers, run counter to those norms.
Topic:: Security, Government, and Terrorism
Political Geography:: America and Greece

707. A New Realism: A Realistic and Principled Foreign Policy

Author:: Bill Richardson
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: The United States needs a foreign policy that is based on reality and is loyal to American values. The next U.S. president needs to send a clear signal to the world that America has turned the corner and will once again be a leader rather than a unilateralist loner. Getting out of Iraq and restoring our reputation are necessary first steps toward a new strategy of U.S. global engagement and leadership.
Political Geography:: United States, Iraq, and America

708. America's Priorities in the War on Terror: Islamists, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan

Author:: Michael D. Huckabee
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. In particular, it should focus on eliminating Islamist terrorists, stabilizing Iraq, containing Iran, and toughening its stance with Pakistan.
Political Geography:: Pakistan, Iraq, America, and Iran

709. America the Resilient: Defying Terrorism and Mitigating Natural Disasters

Author:: Stephen E. Flynn
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: A climate of fear and a sense of powerlessness caused by the threats of terrorism and natural disasters are undermining American ideals and fueling political demagoguery. Rebuilding the resilience of American society is the way to reverse this and respond to today's challenges.
Political Geography:: America

710. Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism

Author:: Jerry Z. Muller
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
Political Geography:: America

711. To the Editor: Misunderstanding India

Author:: Rajiv Sikri
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: R. Nicholas Burns' case ("America's Strategic Opportunity With India," November/December 2007) for a U.S.-Indian partnership rests on flawed assumptions. Contrary to what Burns states, the nuclear issue has not been the key point keeping India and the United States apart. Indian mistrust of the United States is rooted in the decades-old U.S. policy of military and diplomatic support for Pakistan. The United States' opposition to India's becoming a nuclear weapons power and its unwillingness to support India's permanent membership in the UN Security Council have only strengthened Indian misgivings.
Topic:: United Nations
Political Geography:: Pakistan, United States, America, and India

712. Download Full Journal

Author:: Ilan Berman
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: Over the past year, the American public has been treated to a chorus of critics and skeptics who have downplayed the seriousness of the threats we face in the post-September 11th world. Former government officials like Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski have accused the Bush administration of hyping the War on Terror in order to promote a culture of fear. Others deny that we are at war at all.
Political Geography:: America

713. Editor's Corner

Author:: Ilan Berman
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: Europe, it has long been said, is America's most important and enduring international partner. There is much to lend credence to this argument. After all, the political, cultural and military bonds between the United States and its allies across the Atlantic have persisted for centuries, reinforced by economic cooperation and strengthened by periods of shared conflict.
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Europe

714. The Battle for Our Common Future

Author:: Michael Chertoff
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: Over the past year, the American public has been treated to a chorus of critics and skeptics who have downplayed the seriousness of the threats we face in the post-September 11th world. Former government officials like Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski have accused the Bush administration of hyping the War on Terror in order to promote a culture of fear. Others deny that we are at war at all.
Political Geography:: America

715. Is the Special Relationship Still Special?

Author:: Sally McNamara
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: America has found its strongest, most enduring alliance in its Special Relationship with Great Britain. This relationship has been defined by consistent and recurring cooperation, systematic engagement, and enduring bilateral relations that emerged from common values and obvious interests. Mutual recognition of the value of democratic government, the rule of law, individual rights, and the market economy are combined with a single historical and cultural experience until 1776, continued cultural intermingling since then, and a common language. America and Britain, in other words, have a relationship of both “blood and philosophy.”
Political Geography:: Britain and America

716. Berlin's Best Hope

Author:: Ulf Gartzke
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: Since taking office in November 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has racked up an impressive foreign policy record. First and foremost, Merkel moved quickly to repair transatlantic relations with Washington, which had been badly damaged over the Iraq war under former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Red-Green government. While European politicians on the Left have repeatedly resorted to anti-American rhetoric as a crucial element of successful election campaigns, Germany's conservative CDU/CSU parties firmly believe that strong political and security ties with the United States are an indispensable pillar of German foreign policy. And after Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac essentially turned 10 Downing Street and the Élysée Palace into lame-duck residencies, Chancellor Merkel's early effort to reach out to Washington paid off, with her emerging as President Bush's most important partner in Europe.
Political Geography:: America, Europe, and Germany

717. Looking Back to Look Forward

Author:: Asaf Romirowsky
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Journal of International Security Affairs
Institution:: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Abstract:: The enormity of September 11th, the massive scale of destruction and loss brought about by calculated suicide hijacking and a desire to kill for the sake of killing, forced America to open its eyes and take a closer look at the Middle East. More than any other single event over the past few decades, 9/11 has been responsible for generating questions about the nature of U.S. involvement in the region.
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Middle East

718. Turkish Perceptions of the West

Author:: Kudret Bülbül, Bekir Berat Özipek, and İbrahim Kalın
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Insight Turkey
Institution:: SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:: This article, based on a book published by SETA, looks at the attitudes of Turkish people towards what is conceived as the West and Western culture. While some polls suggest a deep anti-European and anti-American sentiment in Turkey with a clear opposition to Christianity as the religion of the West, the current survey suggests evidence to the contrary. Survey findings show that there is no anti-Westernism in Turkey based on religion, culture, or civilization. Perception of the West is fragmented and does not lend itself to easy categorizations. There is no animosity towards Christianity. In fact, most participants use a respectful and even venerable language when talking about the Christian religion. While most participants do not feel comfortable with the invasion of Turkish society by Western cultural products, they see no essential conflict between the core values of the two cultures. While the perception of Western religion, culture and civilization is mostly fragmented and reveals considerable diversity, Western politics is uniformly perceived as negative and hostile.
Topic:: Politics, Religion, and Culture
Political Geography:: America, Europe, and Turkey

719. Key Points from "Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America's Reputation and Leadership"

Author:: Madeleine Albright
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: Council of American Ambassadors
Abstract:: America's next president will face an array of problems more daunting than any since the Vietnam era and will be constrained to do so with US assets—military, economic and political—under severe strain. Our new leader must therefore arrive in the Oval Office equipped not only with the right programs, but also the right temperament to handle the world's most challenging job. Qualifications include analytical skill, an understanding of global strategy, a willingness to recognize and correct mistakes, and a gift for persuading others to do—and even more important to want—what we want.
Topic:: International Relations, Security, Development, Diplomacy, and War
Political Geography:: America and Vietnam

720. Statement

Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: Council of American Ambassadors
Abstract:: The Council of American Ambassadors is a nonpartisan, professional organization established in 1983 that endeavors to educate the public about policy issues affecting the national interest. It also supports the role of the ambassador and the embassy team in carrying out US foreign policy in countries around the world.
Political Geography:: America

721. Memory and Violence in Israel/Palestine

Author:: K.M. Fierke
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:: Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:: In 2008, Israel will turn sixty. Landmark birthdays often give rise to reflection on the past. In this case, questions about memory, and whose memory to privilege or commemorate, may have consequences for the future of the region. For the Israelis, the object of memory, and the vehicle of its birth, was the 1948 “War of Independence,” where like David and Goliath, a numerically smaller but technologically and culturally superior power, faced down a larger but inferior one. Following just a few years after the Holocaust in Europe, Israel's military victory offered, in the words of Nahum Goldman, an American Zionist leader, “a glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise” (Shlaim 2000: 40). For Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, the Israeli narrative is not merely offensive but a source of humiliation itself, given the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians that occurred during al Nakba (the Catastrophe), with the dispossession of over 750,000 indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and their descendents. For Palestinians, the failure of the Israeli state to ac knowledge 1948 as an ethnic cleansing continues to underpin the conflict.
Political Geography:: America, Europe, Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

722. Germany, Afterwards

Author:: Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:: Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:: Do human rights scholars need to learn more about the minutiae of the Nazi period, or the immediate post-war period? One wonders whether there is any benefit, other than one of historical interest, to learning about the way African-American soldiers and their children with white German women were treated under the American occupation of Germany. Similarly, one might wonder whether the study of continued German and American Catholic anti-Semitism after 1945 can be of any benefit, when the largest question concerning Jews in the 21st century is the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, in an age when mass rape in warfare is common, it may be mere prurience to read about mass rapes of German women by Russian soldiers. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, do we need to know that East German Communists were often as corrupt as their Nazi predecessors?
Topic:: Civil Society and Peace Studies
Political Geography:: Africa, America, Europe, Palestine, and Germany

723. Commentary: The Challenge for Turkey's True Friends: the AK Party Closure Case and the West

Author:: Joshua Walker
Publication Date:: 04-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Insight Turkey
Institution:: SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:: The recent closure case brought against the ruling Justice and Development Party is a direct assault on Turkey's democracy. For this reason, America should not lose the opportunity to swiftly and unequivocally repudiate the establishment's attempts to re-assert control over Turkish politics by undemocratic means. The lack of a concrete resolution on the part of the U.S. in regard to the case has already resulted in a credibility gap. Given America's emphasis on and interest in Turkey's democracy and attendant reform process, a simple re-affirmation of its commitment to citizen's choices in free and fair elections would send a powerful message to a country that is on edge. Instead, Turkey is left with 'friends' who lack credibility and resolve at the worst possible moment. If the ruling party and its leadership are banned from political life, not only will Turkey lose its credibility in the Middle East as the only indigenous Muslim-majority democracy, the United States will also lose credibility in the world theatre for failing to support democracy in Turkey.
Topic:: Civil Society, Democratization, Government, Islam, Politics, and United Nations
Political Geography:: America and Turkey

724. Does the Price of Watermelons Matter? Economic Performance and Political Legitimacy in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Author:: Nicholas Gossen
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: al Nakhlah
Institution:: The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Abstract:: Despite Ayatollah Khomeini's famous comment that the Iranian revolution was “not about the price of watermelons,” the Islamic Republic of Iran was in part founded on economic promises of redistribution, equality, and justice. The strength of this rhetoric has formed a core basis of political support for the regime, but it has also established public expectations that the Islamic Republic has been chronically unable to meet. Many analysts have cited Iran's poor economic performance since the revolution and resulting public dissatisfaction as a key weakness of the clerical regime and a potential source of its downfall. Indeed, this is a crucial element of the argument advanced by advocates of stronger multilateral economic sanctions against Iran in the dispute over its nuclear program. However, underlying this logic is an implicit assumption that regime legitimacy is tied to economic performance. While intuitively appealing, this assumption bears further scrutiny, particularly if it forms a basis for American policy decisions towards Iran. The primary goal of this paper is to examine the political and economic factors that have caused the gap between economic rhetoric and performance in Iran, and to assess the extent to which that gap has affected the political legitimacy of the Iranian regime.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: America, Iran, Middle East, and Beijing

725. Friedman and Russia

Author:: Andrei Illarionov
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Cato Journal
Institution:: The Cato Institute
Abstract:: One day I asked Milton Friedman a question. That question was in my mind every time we met: “Could he have achieved the same status he did in America if he had lived in Russia—not only in terms of his research, but in shaping his outlook on life and in his under-standing of freedom?” Having kept silent for a moment, he answered: “no.”
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: Russia, United States, America, Europe, and Asia

726. The Collateral Source Rule: Statutory Reform and Special Interests

Author:: David Schap and Andrew Feeley
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Cato Journal
Institution:: The Cato Institute
Abstract:: Paul Rubin (2005) has addressed the evolution of American tort law from a public choice perspective. In contrast to earlier work in law and economics, which generally regarded tort law norms as efficient (Landes and Posner 1987), Rubin relied on more recent work in the field (Epstein 1988, Rubin and Bailey 1994) that regards tort law as being shaped by the special interests of plaintiff and (perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent) defense attorneys. In addition, Rubin envisioned business interests' influence toward tort reform as enhancing efficiency. He ended his article with a call for additional empirical research on modern American tort law from the public choice perspective and indeed suggested a number of specific items and areas of possible fruitful research. The spirit of Rubin's anticipated research program, as well as many of his specific suggestions, can be applied to our survey research findings concerning statutory reform of the collateral source rule.
Political Geography:: America

727. Water in the 21st Century: Defining the Elements of Global Crises and Potential Solutions

Author:: Umpanu Lall, Tanya Heikkila, Casey Brown, and Tobias Siegfried
Publication Date:: 10-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of International Affairs
Institution:: School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:: Will we run out of fresh water in the 21st century? The media highlights the parched lands, dry riverbeds and springs and falling groundwater tables across the world daily. Over a billion people living in developing countries without access to safe drinking water are facing economic and water poverty. Another real and troubling indicator is the rapid rate of aquatic habitat degradation and biodiversity loss in the last century. Projected changes in climate due to greenhouse gases invariably portray a future world that is much drier in the tropics—where over half the world's population lives—and suggest a global increase in floods and droughts.
Topic:: World Bank
Political Geography:: America and United Nations

728. Principled or Stubborn? Western Policy toward Hamas

Author:: Nathan J. Brown
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: American and European policies toward Hamas have been based largely on the movement's reputation as terrorist, a threat to the peace process and emblematic of the dangers contained in democratic reform. While some debate has occurred in policy circles, US policy remains extremely strict. This has had effects, many of which are negative (undermining Palestinian institutions), while it has not produced a softening of Hamas' position. In recent years, some European states have shown discomfort with the harshness of this policy and the political chaos it threatens to unleash. An alternative policy toward Hamas, more conditional and nuanced, would not necessarily have produced better results over the short term, although it could have produced longer term changes and avoided some of the costs of the draconian path followed.
Political Geography:: America, Europe, and Palestine

729. European and American Roles in Nation-Building

Author:: James Dobbins
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Contrary to popular belief, the number of conflicts and the number of casualties, refugees and displaced persons resulting from them has fallen dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Previously, with neither superpower wanting a dispute to be settled to its disadvantage, conflicts dragged on indefinitely or were permanently frozen. After 1989, dynamics changed and international interventions began to pursue more far-reaching objectives: to disarm combatants, promote civil society, restore the economy, etc. Nation-building thus replaced inter-positional peacekeeping as the dominant form of international intervention with such missions becoming larger, longer and more frequent. The UN's success rate, as measured in enhanced security, economic growth, return of refugees and installation of representative governments meets or exceeds that of NATO- and EU-led missions in almost every category. It is time, therefore, for Western governments, militaries and populations to get over their disappointment at the UN's early failures and begin once again to do their fair share in these efforts.
Topic:: NATO, Cold War, and Government
Political Geography:: America and Europe

730. The Foundations of American National Security

Author:: Francesco N. Moro
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Creating the national security state : a history of the law that transformed America, Douglas T. Stuart, Princeton University Press, 2008
Topic:: Security
Political Geography:: America

731. Reviving Liberalism. A New Course for US Foreign Policy

Author:: Emiliano Alessandri
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Confronting global terrorism and American neo-conservatism: the framework of a liberal grand strategy, Tom Farer, Oxford University Press, 2008
Topic:: Terrorism
Political Geography:: United States and America

732. In Search of the Right War

Author:: Roberto Menotti
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Winning the right war : the path to security for America and the world, Philip H. Gordon, Times Books, 2007
Topic:: Security and War
Political Geography:: America

733. A Neo-liberal Agenda for America

Author:: Emiliano Alessandri
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Statecraft : and how to restore America's standing in the world, Dennis Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
Political Geography:: America

734. Ancient and Modern Empires: The United States as the New Rome

Author:: Riccardo Monaco
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Are we Rome? : the fall of an empire and the fate of America, Cullen Murphy, Houghton Mifflin, 2007
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Rome

735. From the Editor

Author:: Craig Biddle
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Welcome to the now-orange-for-better-visibility-on-the-newsstands Fall 2008 issue of TOS. Here is a preview of the seven articles at hand:My essay, "McBama vs. America," surveys the promises of John McCain and Barack Obama, shows that these intentions are at odds with the American ideal of individual rights, demonstrates that the cause of such political aims is a particular moral philosophy (shared by McCain and Obama), and calls for Americans to repudiate that morality and to embrace instead a morality that supports the American ideal.
Topic:: Government
Political Geography:: Japan and America

736. The Resurgence of Big Government

Author:: Yaron Brook
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Following the economic disasters of the 1960s and 1970s, brought on by the statist policies of the political left, America seemed to change course. Commentators called the shift the "swing to the right"-that is, toward capitalism. From about 1980 to 2000, a new attitude took hold: the idea that government should be smaller, that recessions are best dealt with through tax cuts and deregulation, that markets work pretty effectively, and that many existing government interventions are doing more harm than good. President Bill Clinton found it necessary to declare, "The era of big government is over." Today that attitude has virtually vanished from the public stage. We are now witnessing a swing back to the left-toward statism. As a wave of recent articles have proclaimed: The era of big government is back. The evidence is hard to miss. Consider our current housing and credit crisis. From day one, it was blamed on the market and a lack of oversight by regulators who were said to be "asleep at the wheel." In response to the crisis, the government, the policy analysts, the media, and the American people demanded action, and everyone understood this to mean more government, more regulation, more controls. We got our wish. First came the Fed's panicked slashing of interest rates. Then the bailout of Bear Stearns. Then the bailout of Freddie Mac. Then a $300 billion mortgage bill, which passed by a substantial margin and was signed into law by President Bush. No doubt more is to come. All of this intervention, of course, is supported by our presidential candidates. Both blame Wall Street for the current problems and vow to increase the power of the Fed's and the SEC's financial regulators. John McCain has announced that there are "some greedy people on Wall Street that perhaps need to be punished." Both he and Barack Obama envision an ever-growing role for government in the marketplace, each promises to raise taxes in some form or another, and both support more regulations, particularly on Wall Street. Few doubt they will keep these promises. What do Americans think of all this? A recent poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News found that 53 percent of Americans want the government to "do more to solve problems." Twelve years earlier, Americans said they opposed government interference by a 2-to-1 margin. In fact, our government has been "doing more" throughout this decade. While President Bush has paid lip service to freer markets, his administration has engineered a vast increase in the size and reach of government. He gave us Sarbanes-Oxley, the largest expansion of business regulation in decades. He gave us the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the largest new entitlement program in thirty years. He gave us the "No Child Left Behind Act," the largest expansion of the federal government in education since 1979. This is to say nothing of the orgy of spending over which he has presided: His 2009 budget stands at more than $3 trillion-an increase of more than a $1 trillion since he took office. All of this led one conservative columnist to label Bush "a big government conservative." It was not meant as a criticism. Americans entered the 21st century enjoying the greatest prosperity in mankind's history. And many agreed that this prosperity was mainly the result of freeing markets from government intervention, not only in America, but also around the world. Yet today, virtually everyone agrees that markets have failed. Why? What happened? To identify the cause of today's swing to the left, we need first to understand the cause and consequences of the swing to the right.
Topic:: Education and Government
Political Geography:: America

737. Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America

Author:: Paul Hsieh
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Identifies the theory behind the Massachusetts mandatory health insurance program, exposes the program as a fiasco, explains why the theory had to fail in practice, and sheds light on the only genuine, rights-respecting means to affordable, accessible health care for Americans.
Topic:: Government and Health
Political Geography:: America

738. Deeper Than Kelo: The Roots of the Property Rights Crisis

Author:: Eric Daniels
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: On June 23, 2005, the United States Supreme Court's acquiescence in a municipal government's use of eminent domain to advance "economic development" goals sent shockwaves across the country. When the Court announced its decision in Kelo v. City of New London, average homeowners realized that their houses could be condemned, seized, and handed over to other private parties. They wanted to know what had gone wrong, why the Constitution and Fifth Amendment had failed to protect their property rights. The crux of the decision, and the source of so much indignation, was the majority opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens, which contended that "economic development" was such a "traditional and long accepted function of government" that it fell under the rubric of "public use." If a municipality or state determined, through a "carefully considered" planning process, that taking land from one owner and giving it to another would lead to increased tax revenue, job growth, and the revitalization of depressed urban areas, the Court would allow it. If the government had to condemn private homes to meet "the diverse and always evolving needs of society," Stevens wrote, so be it. The reaction to the Kelo decision was swift and widespread. Surveys showed that 80 to 90 percent of Americans opposed the decision. Politicians from both parties spoke out against it. Such strange bedfellows as Rush Limbaugh and Ralph Nader were united in their opposition to the Court's ruling. Legislatures in more than forty states proposed and most then passed eminent domain "reforms." In the 2006 elections, nearly one dozen states considered anti-Kelo ballot initiatives, and ten such measures passed. On the one-year anniversary of the decision, President Bush issued an executive order that barred federal agencies from using eminent domain to take property for economic development purposes (even though the primary use of eminent domain is by state and local agencies). The "backlash" against the Court's Kelo decision continues today by way of reform efforts in California and other states. Public outcry notwithstanding, the Kelo decision did not represent a substantial worsening of the state of property rights in America. Rather, the Kelo decision reaffirmed decades of precedent-precedent unfortunately rooted in the origins of the American system. Nor is eminent domain the only threat to property rights in America. Even if the federal and state governments abolished eminent domain tomorrow, property rights would still be insecure, because the cause of the problem is more fundamental than law or politics. In order to identify the fundamental cause of the property rights crisis, we must observe how the American legal and political system has treated property rights over the course of the past two centuries and take note of the ideas offered in support of their rulings and regulations. In so doing, we will see that the assault on property rights in America is the result of a long chain of historical precedent moored in widespread acceptance of a particular moral philosophy.Property, Principle, and Precedent In the Revolutionary era, America's Founding Fathers argued that respect for property rights formed the very foundation of good government. For instance, Arthur Lee, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote that "the right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty." In a 1792 essay on property published in the National Gazette, James Madison expressed the importance of property to the founding generation. "Government is instituted to protect property of every sort," he explained, "this being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own." Despite this prevalent attitude-along with the strong protections for property contained in the United States Constitution's contracts clause, ex post facto clause, and the prohibition of state interference with currency-the founders accepted the idea that the power of eminent domain, the power to forcibly wrest property from private individuals, was a legitimate power of sovereignty resting in all governments. Although the founders held that the "despotic power" of eminent domain should be limited to taking property for "public use," and that the victims of such takings were due "just compensation," their acceptance of its legitimacy was the tip of a wedge. The principle that property rights are inalienable had been violated. If the government can properly take property for "public use," then property rights are not absolute, and the extent to which they can be violated depends on the meaning ascribed to "public use." From the earliest adjudication of eminent domain cases, it became clear that the term "public use" would cause problems. Although the founders intended eminent domain to be used only for public projects such as roads, 19th-century legislatures began using it to transfer property to private parties, such as mill and dam owners or canal and railroad companies, on the grounds that they were open to public use and provided wide public benefits. Add to this the fact that, during the New Deal, the Supreme Court explicitly endorsed the idea that property issues were to be determined not by reference to the principle of individual rights but by legislative majorities, and you have the foundation for all that followed. . . .
Topic:: Development and Economics
Political Geography:: United States, America, and London

739. How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health

Author:: Stella Daily
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: This article is dedicated to Anna Tomalis, a young girl who died of liver cancer on August 15, 2008. Anna's parents desperately sought experimental treatment that might have saved her life, but were delayed for months by FDA bureaucracy. Anna finally received approval to obtain treatment through a clinical trial in July, but died after receiving just one round of treatment. She was thirteen years old. Abigail Burroughs was not the typical cancer patient: She was just nineteen years old when she was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer that had spread to her neck and lungs. Her prognosis was poor, but a then-experimental drug, Erbitux, offered the hope of saving her life. Abigail was denied that hope by the Food and Drug Administration. Because the drug was considered experimental, she could receive it only as part of a clinical trial-and Abigail was ineligible to participate in any trials at the time. Despite the best efforts of her family, friends, and doctor, Abigail was unable to receive the treatment that might have saved her life. At twenty-one years old, Abigail died of her disease. Abigail's father, Frank Burroughs, thought other patients with life-threatening illnesses should not be denied the ability to try any treatment that might give them a chance. In his daughter's name, he formed the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, which sued the FDA in 2003. The group argued that the FDA's restrictions on access to experimental treatments constitute a violation of the right to self-defense as well as of the Fifth Amendment right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In August 2007, the Appeals Court of the District of Columbia struck a blow against the Abigail Alliance, and against individual rights, when it ruled that patients, even the terminally ill, do not have the right to receive treatment that has not been approved by the FDA. Erbitux has since been approved by the FDA to treat cancer of the head and neck-too late, of course, for Abigail Burroughs. How has America come to a point where the government denies dying patients the right to try to save their own lives? To answer that question, let us begin with a brief history of the Food and Drug Administration.A Brief History of the FDA Prior to the 20th century, the government did not regulate pharmaceutical products in the United States. Although Congress had considered federal regulations on food and drug safety as early as 1879, it had refrained from passing any legislation in this regard. However, with the muckraking journalism of the early 1900s, and especially with the publication of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which portrayed unsavory practices in the meatpacking industry, the American public clamored for laws to ensure the safe production of food and drugs. This public outcry pushed Congress to pass federal legislation in 1906. As the resulting Food and Drugs Act applied to drugs specifically, products were required to be sold only at certain levels of purity, strength, and quality; and ingredients considered dangerous (such as morphine or alcohol) had to be listed on the product's label. Violators would be subject to seizure of goods, fines, or imprisonment. Thus, in order to enforce the Act, the Food and Drug Administration was born. In its early years, the agency focused primarily on food rather than on pharmaceuticals, but in 1937 it increased its focus on drugs after a new formulation of sulfanilamide, a drug that had previously been successfully used to treat certain bacterial infections, proved to be deadly. The drug's manufacturer, S. E. Massengill Company, had dissolved an effective drug in a toxic solvent. More than one hundred people, babies and children among them, died as a result of taking Massengill's product, known as Elixir Sulfanilamide. Under the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, the FDA was not authorized to prosecute Massengill for selling an unsafe drug, and the agency had the power to recall Elixir Sulfanilamide only via a technicality. Because "elixir" was defined as a drug dissolved in alcohol, and because Massengill's formulation used the nonalcoholic solvent ethylene glycol, the product was technically mislabeled, bringing it under FDA jurisdiction and enabling the agency to recall the product. The public and legislators wanted more: They wanted the FDA not only to recall mislabeled products, but to prevent the sale of unsafe drugs in the first place. Thus, popular demand gave rise to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938, which greatly expanded the FDA's authority. The most important change brought about by this Act was a shift in the burden of proof. Rather than prosecuting a drugmaker after the fact for having fraudulently marketed a product, the FDA would now require proof of safety before a drug could be marketed at all. (Note that this required manufacturers to prove a negative-i.e., that a given drug would not harm consumers.) After World War II, pharmaceutical companies came under still more scrutiny. Then, as now, complaints about the cost of drugs reached Congress, and in 1961 Senator Estes Kefauver led the charge in an investigation not only of drug pricing, but of the relationship between the drug industry and the FDA. Kefauver sought to pass legislation that would increase the agency's authority over drug production, distribution, and advertising. Whereas previously proof of safety alone was required to gain FDA approval, the proposed law would require drug manufacturers also to prove the efficacy of their products. Kefauver's bill might have languished in congressional debate but for the emergence at that time of data showing that thalidomide, which was then sold as a sleep aid and antinausea medication for pregnant women, caused severe birth defects in the children of women who took it. Thalidomide had not yet been approved for use in the United States at that time due to concerns of an FDA reviewer over a different side effect noted in the drug's application for approval. The drug was widely used in other countries, however, and the babies of many women who used it were born with grotesquely deformed limbs. As their harrowing images flooded the media, Americans realized they had narrowly escaped inflicting these deformities on their own children. The resulting public outcry led to Kefauver's bill being made law in 1962. This law served as the cornerstone for the wide powers that the FDA acquired thereafter, from requiring companies to include warnings in drug advertisements to dictating the way companies must investigate their own experimental compounds. Thus, although the scope and power of the FDA were modest at the agency's inception, its scope widened and its power increased markedly in the decades that followed. Now, a century later, the agency's purview includes foods and drugs for humans and animals, cosmetics, medical devices (including everything from breast implants to powered wheelchairs), blood and tissues, vaccines, and any products deemed to be radiation emitters (including cell phones and lasers). And the agency's power is nothing short of enormous. . . .
Topic:: Health
Political Geography:: America

740. Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions

Author:: Elan Journo
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: The measure of success in the Iraq war has undergone a curious progression. Early on, the Bush administration held up the vision of a peaceful, prosperous, pro-Western Iraq as its benchmark. But the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein were replaced by the horrors of a sadistic sectarian war and a fierce insurgency that consumed thousands of American lives. And the post-invasion Iraqi regime, it turns out, is led by Islamist parties allied with religious militias and intimately tied to the belligerent Iranian regime. The benchmark, if we can call it that, then shrank to the somewhat lesser vision of an Iraqi government that can stand up on its own, so that America can stand down. But that did not materialize, either. So we heard that if only the fractious Sunni and Shiite factions in the Iraqi government could have breathing space to reconcile their differences, and if only we could do more to blunt the force of the insurgency, that would be progress. To that end, in early 2007, the administration ordered a "surge" of tens of thousands more American forces to rein in the chaos in Iraq. Today, we hear John McCain and legions of conservatives braying that we are, in fact, winning (some go so far as to say we have already won). Why? Because the "surge" has reduced the number of attacks on U.S. troops to the levels seen a few years ago (when the insurgency was raging wildly) and the number of Iraqis slaughtering their fellow countrymen has taken a momentary dip. Victory, apparently, requires only clearing out insurgents (for a while) from their perches in some neighborhoods, even though Teheran's influence in the country grows and Islamists carve out Taliban-like fiefdoms in Iraq. The goals in Iraq "have visibly been getting smaller," observes John Agresto, a once keen but now disillusioned supporter of the campaign (p. 172). Iraq, he argues contra his fellow conservatives, has been a fiasco. "If we call it 'success,' it's only because we've lowered the benchmark to near zero" (p. 191). . . .
Topic:: War
Political Geography:: Iraq and America

741. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Author:: Eric Daniels
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: One of the distinguishing features of American life is the large degree of freedom we have in making choices about our lives. When choosing our diets, we have the freedom to choose everything from subsisting exclusively on junk food to consuming meticulously planned portions of fat, protein, and carbohydrate. When choosing how to conduct ourselves financially, we have the freedom to choose everything from a highly leveraged lifestyle of debt to a modest save-for-a-rainy-day approach. In every area of life, from health care to education to personal relationships, we are free to make countless decisions that affect our long-term happiness and prosperity-or lack thereof. According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors at the University of Chicago and authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, this freedom and range of options is problematic. The problem, they say, is that most people, when given the opportunity, make bad choices; although Americans naturally want to do what is best for themselves, human fallibility often prevents them from knowing just what that is. "Most of us are busy, our lives are complicated, and we can't spend all our time thinking and analyzing everything" (p. 22). Average Americans, say Thaler and Sunstein, tend to favor the status quo, fall victim to temptation, use mental shortcuts, lack self-control, and follow the herd; as a result, they eat too much junk food, save too little, make bad investments, and buy faddish but useless products. Many Americans, according to the authors, are more like Homer Simpson (impulsive and easily fooled) than homo economicus (cool, calculating, and rational). "One of our major goals in this book," they note, "is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us" (p. 22). The particular areas where these Homers need the most help are those in which choices "have delayed effects . . . [are] difficult, infrequent, and offer poor feedback, and those for which the relation between choice and experience is ambiguous" (pp. 77-78).The central theme of Nudge is the idea that government and the private sector can improve people's choices by manipulating the "choice architecture" they face. As Thaler and Sunstein explain, people's choices are often shaped by the way in which alternatives are presented. If a doctor explains to his patient that a proposed medical procedure results in success in 90 percent of cases, that patient will often make a different decision from the one he would have made if the doctor had told him that one in ten patients dies from the procedure. Free markets, the authors argue, too often cater to and exploit people's tendencies to make less than rational choices. Faced with choices about extended warranties or health care plans or investing in one's education, only the most exceptional and rational people will make the "correct" choices. Most people, the authors argue, cannot avoid the common foibles of bad thinking; thus we ought to adopt a better way of framing and structuring choices so that people will be more likely to make better decisions and thereby do better for themselves. Hence the title: By presenting information in a specific way, "choice architects" can "nudge" the chooser in the "right" direction, even while maintaining his "freedom of choice."
Topic:: Health
Political Geography:: America and Chicago

742. The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack

Author:: Joe Kroeger
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: In the years since the attacks of 9/11, there have been numerous attempts by terrorists to attack Americans on our own soil, but all of these attempts have been foiled. Who is responsible for this remarkable record, and how have they achieved it? These questions are answered in Ronald Kessler's recent book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, which surveys the work of the individuals involved in America's intelligence community since 9/11. In twenty-seven brief chapters, Kessler documents the post-9/11 work of the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and other agencies-showing the organizational, tactical, and technological changes that have occurred, along with their positive results. The book begins by recounting the events of September 11, 2001, from President Bush being informed of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, to his "We're at war" declaration, to the initial coordination of efforts among the vice president, the military, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Proceeding from there, Kessler shows how the CIA immediately linked some of the hijackers to Al Qaeda and how, a few days later, the president began redirecting the priorities of the FBI and the Justice Department from prosecuting terrorists to preventing attacks. . . .
Political Geography:: America

743. First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War by George Weller, edited and with an essay

Author:: John David Lewis
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: During World War II, the prime source of information for Americans about the war overseas was the dispatches of foreign correspondents-men who put their lives on the line in war zones to report the truth. George Weller was a giant among such men. Captured by the Nazis and traded for a German journalist, Weller watched the Belgian Congolese Army attack Italians in Ethiopia, saw the invasion of Crete, interviewed Charles de Gaulle in South Africa following an escape through Lisbon, and overcame malaria to report on the war in the Pacific. He was the first foreign correspondent trained as a paratrooper, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his report of an appendectomy on a submarine. He wrote the book Singapore is Silent in 1942 after seeing the city fall to the Japanese, and he advocated a global system of United States bases in his 1943 book Bases Overseas. After witnessing Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945, he broke General Douglas MacArthur's order against travel to Nagasaki by impersonating an American colonel and taking a train to the bombed-out city. In a period of six weeks, he sent typewritten dispatches totaling some fifty thousand words back to American newspapers through official channels of the military occupation. Under MacArthur's directives, they were censored and never made it into print. Weller died in 2002 thinking his dispatches had been lost. Months later his son, Anthony Weller, found a crate of moldy papers with the only surviving carbon copies. Anthony Weller edited the dispatches and included his own essay about his father, resulting in this priceless addition to our information about World War II in the Pacific, and the birth of the atomic age. The importance of the dispatches, however, extends far beyond the value of the information from Nagasaki. George Weller is a voice from a past generation, and the publication of his censored dispatches raises a series of deeply important issues and, in the process, reveals an immense cultural divide between his world and ours today. On September 8, 1945, two days after he arrived in Nagasaki, Weller wrote his third dispatch concerning Nagasaki itself. He described wounded Japanese in two of Nagasaki's undestroyed hospitals, and recorded the question posed by his official guide: Showing them to you, as the first American outsider to reach Nagasaki since the surrender, your propaganda-conscious official guide looks meaningfully in your face and wants to know: "What do you think?" What this question means is: Do you intend writing that America did something inhuman in loosing this weapon against Japan? That is what we want you to write (p. 37). What would many reporters today write if asked this question by bombed enemy civilians? . . .
Topic:: War
Political Geography:: Japan, America, Germany, and Nagasaki

744. McBama vs. America

Author:: Craig Biddle
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Surveys the promises of John McCain and Barack Obama, shows that these intentions are at odds with the American ideal of individual rights, demonstrates that the cause of such political aims is a particular moral philosophy (shared by McCain and Obama), and calls for Americans to repudiate that morality and to embrace instead a morality that supports the American ideal.
Political Geography:: America and Europe

745. From the Editor

Author:: Craig Biddle
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: No abstract is available.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: America

746. Capitalism and the Moral High Ground

Author:: Craig Biddle
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Concretizes the selfishness-enabling nature of capitalism and shows why this feature makes it the only moral social system on earth.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: America

747. The Assault on Energy Producers

Author:: Brian P. Simpson
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: "We've got to go after the oil companies," says President-elect Barack Obama in response to high oil and gasoline prices. "We've got to go after [their] windfall profits." Explaining the purpose of recently proposed energy legislation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says: "We are forcing oil companies to change their ways. We will hold them accountable for unconscionable price-gouging and force them to invest in renewable energy or pay a price for refusing to do so." Calling for government seizure of private power plants, California Senate Leader John Burton insists: "We have to do something. These people have got us by the throat. They're making more money than God, and we've got to fight back-not with words, but with actions." This attitude toward energy producers, which is practically unanimous among American politicians today, is wreaking havoc not only on the lives and rights of these producers, but on the lives and rights of Americans in general. It leads to laws and regulations that prohibit producers and consumers from acting on their rational judgment with respect to energy. It causes energy shortages, brownouts, and blackouts that thwart everyone's ability to be productive and enjoy life. And it results in higher prices not only for energy, but for every good and service that depends on energy-which means every good and service in the marketplace, from food to transportation to medical care to sporting events to education to housing. Energy producers, like all rational businessmen, are in business to make money. Profits are what motivate them to exert the requisite brain power, to engage in the necessary research, and to invest the massive amounts of money required to produce and deliver the energy we need to light, heat, and cool our homes, and to power the factories, workplaces, and tools required to produce the goods on which our lives depend. Their profit motive is to our benefit. Moreover, energy producers, like all human beings, have a moral right to act according to their own judgment so long as they do not violate the rights of others. They have a moral right to use and dispose of the product of their effort as they see fit. They have a moral right to contract with customers by mutual consent to mutual benefit. In other words, they have a moral right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. And it is only by respecting these rights that we can expect energy producers to produce energy. So let us examine the assault on these producers, count the ways in which this assault is both impractical and immoral, and specify what must be done to rectify this injustice. . . .
Topic:: Government
Political Geography:: America and California

748. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

Author:: Eric Daniels
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Seventy-five years have elapsed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the flurry of government programs he called the New Deal. In the years since, most historians have lavished FDR with praise, claiming that his bold leadership helped to pull America out of the Great Depression. Even those who acknowledge the failure of particular Roosevelt-era programs claim that FDR instilled hope and confidence in the American people, and that his economic failures were the result of his not going far enough in his policies and not spending enough money. Today, amidst calls for increasing government regulation of the financial industry and increasing government spending through stimulus packages, the New Deal is making a comeback. In light of the recent mortgage crisis and economic downturn, pundits are calling for a revival of 1930s-style policies. Daniel Gross claimed at Slate.com that New Deal reforms were "saving capitalism again." Newly minted Nobel economist Paul Krugman issued calls in the New York Times for President-elect Obama to mimic and expand FDR's response to the Great Depression. And a recent Time cover called for a "New New Deal"-and featured an iconic photo of FDR, with Obama's face and hands substituted. As the Obama administration begins to implement its economic plan, Americans would do well to reexamine the history of the original New Deal and its effects. Though most historians rank FDR as a great president, some, including Burton Folsom Jr., boldly dare to ask if "the New Deal, rather than helping to cure the Great Depression, actually help[ed to] prolong it" (p. 7). According to Folsom, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, the answer is clearly the latter. In New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, he challenges the myth that FDR's New Deal represents a shining moment in American history. As long as the mythology surrounding the New Deal remains intact, he notes, "the principles of public policy derived from the New Deal will continue to dominate American politics" (p. 15), costing Americans billions of dollars and further damaging the economy. . . .
Topic:: Economics, Government, and History
Political Geography:: America

749. Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000

Author:: Gus Van Horn
Publication Date:: 12-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: In August 1919, three white men brutally beat John R. Shillady in broad daylight outside his hotel. Shillady, also white, had come to Austin, Texas, as executive secretary of the NAACP to persuade state officials not to suppress its local branch. One of his attackers, a county judge, claimed that "it was my duty to stop him" because Shillady was there to "sow discontent among the Negroes" (pp. 105-106). In 1920, Shillady would resign from the NAACP, expressing despair for his cause: "I am less confident than heretofore . . . of the probability of overcoming, within a reasonable period, the forces opposed to Negro equality" (p. 109). And yet, not even a century later, the United States has elected its first black president-in an election in which race was hardly an issue. How did racial equality in America progress so far in so short a time? This is the remarkable story that Adam Fairclough relates in Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000. Fairclough succeeds in making his introduction to the struggle for black equality accessible to the general reader in two ways. First, he concentrates on events in the South, wherein particularly harsh forms of racial domination made it the logical focus of black efforts to achieve equality. Second, he follows the lead of fellow historian John W. Cell and classifies the approaches taken by various figures in his narrative as either "militant confrontation" (defiantly opposing racial oppression), "separatism" (working toward the creation of an all-black society here or abroad), or "accommodation" (gradually securing improvements from within the system of white supremacy) (pp. xi-xii). It is from this perspective that the book's chapters examine prominent individuals, organizations, events, and periods of the civil rights movement. Fairclough begins his narrative at a time when blacks were "more powerless than at any other time since the death of slavery" and had been "purged from the voting rolls" of the former Confederacy (pp. 15-17). He proceeds to examine the many different ways in which blacks fought against discrimination and oppression: from the intransigent, confrontational approach of Ida B. Wells, who campaigned against lynching in the 1890s; to the accommodation of Booker T. Washington, whose emphasis on black self-improvement over confrontation is characterized by Fairclough as "a tactical retreat in order to prepare the way for a strategic advance" (p. 63); to the separatism of Marcus Garvey, who proposed that blacks fight for an independent, united Africa (p. 126). Fairclough continues this kind of analysis throughout subsequent chapters, where we learn, among other things, about the involvement of the labor movement and the Communist party in the civil rights movement during the 1930s, the evolution of the NAACP's strategy to include legal challenges to discrimination in education after World War II and then mass civil disobedience after 1955, and the rise and fall of the "Black Power" movement. . . .
Topic:: War
Political Geography:: United States and America

750. Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid

Author:: Raymond C. Niles
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Surveys the history and achievements of America's electricity entrepreneurs, shows how government interference in the transmission grid has hampered their enterprises from the outset to the present day, and indicates what America must do to liberate the grid and enable a new wave of entrepreneurs to supply this vital product commensurate with the country's demand.
Topic:: Economics and Government
Political Geography:: New York and America

751. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law by Steven M. Teles

Author:: Larry Salzman
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Objective Standard
Institution:: The Objective Standard
Abstract:: Conservatives today have considerable influence on America's legal culture. They are welcome on law school faculties at even the most elite institutions, and they man dozens of think tanks, policy centers, and public interest law foundations pressing varying brands of conservative doctrine on the courts-with a degree of success rivaling competing liberal organizations. Shrill leftists allege a "vast right-wing conspiracy," and senators now begin judicial nomination hearings with hand-wringing warnings about the behind-the-scenes influence of "Federalist Society lawyers."
Political Geography:: America

752. Editorial

Publication Date:: 11-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: Just like the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin (see EJIL Editorial to Volume 19:2) some months ago, the ECJ's decision in Kadi is destined to become a landmark in the annals of international law. Whereas Medellin was generally excoriated as the low water mark of American constitutional and judicial insularity, gruesomely resulting in the actual execution of the principals, Kadi was mostly hailed as an example of the more progressive and open attitude of the ECJ, with the proof of the pudding in the eating – overturning the Council Regulations which gave effect to the measures adopted against the defendants pursuant to the Security Council Resolutions, and doing so on the grounds that they violate fundamental human rights and protections applicable within the legal order of the EU. There, the gallows; chez nous, liberty. Happy Ending.
Topic:: Human Rights
Political Geography:: America

753. Anti-Americanism in Asia? Factors shaping international perceptions of American influence

Author:: Matthew Carlson and Travis Nelson
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:: Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:: Against the backdrop of 9 / 11 and the Bush administration's subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, many have argued that international perceptions of the United States are growing more negative and that 'anti-Americanism' is going to be a problem for American foreign policy in the decades to come. We examine the debate over anti-Americanism by using survey data collected in more than 26 countries that span East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia, with a focus on two empirical questions. First, to what extent do citizens in Asia believe that the United States has a negative (or positive) influence on their country? Second, what factors, at both the individual and national level, shape the perceptions of American influence? Although we uncover little evidence of pervasive anti-Americanism, the results of our multilevel model generally confirm the theoretical importance of three explanations for international perceptions of the United States—interest theories, cultural and political similarities, and increased information and contacts.
Political Geography:: Afghanistan, America, South Asia, Central Asia, and Asia

754. Japanese and American Perspectives on East Asian Regionalism

Author:: Gregory W. Noble
Publication Date:: 05-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:: Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:: Regular convening of East Asian summits and rising concerns about the American dollar have heightened interest in Asian cooperation. Japan will necessarily play a central role in regional endeavors, and the United States must at least acquiesce if regional coordination is to progress. Among American accounts, the most theoretically elaborate and systematically comparative analysis is A World of Regions, while Remapping East Asia provides the most authoritative overview of recent developments. Japanese-language studies of East Asian regionalism agree that regional cooperation is far less institutionalized and rule-based in East Asia than in Europe, but they include a wider range of opinion about the desirability and feasibility of cooperation. Skeptics on the right warn that efforts to create a regional community would weaken the United States–Japan alliance, undermine universal values, and cede regional leadership to China. Optimists on the left counter that regional cooperation holds out the only hope for ameliorating nationalist conflicts. Most numerous are centrists arguing for active cooperation on economics and the environment, but only cautious moves on politics and security. Despite their caution, Japanese authors convey a sense that changes to the American-led global and regional order are occurring and likely will continue.
Political Geography:: Japan, America, Europe, and East Asia

755. Beyond Japan: The Dynamics of East Asian Regionalism

Author:: Keiichi Tsunekawa
Publication Date:: 01-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:: Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:: This volume is a major contribution to the academic effort to understand the nature of region-making in post-crisis East Asia. Before the monetary and financial crisis, East Asia was praised for a rapid economic development based on market-driven regionalization. The 1997–98 crisis crushed the optimistic image of East Asia. But what is actually the nature of regional processes there? The editors' conclusion is clear: The network-type arrangements still characterize the region-making in East Asia, but different from the pre-crisis era, region-formation in contemporary East Asia is neither based on a single national model nor led by a single country; it is rather the process of hybridization of American, Japanese, Chinese, and any other national model.
Topic:: Regional Cooperation
Political Geography:: Japan, China, America, and East Asia

756. "Ignorance Cannot Be Realistic: A Critique of the Mearsheimer-Walt Thesis"

Author:: Ofira Seliktar
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Middle East Review of International Affairs
Institution:: Global Research in International Affairs Center, Interdisciplinary Center
Abstract:: The debate about American support for Israel has been part of the U.S. foreign policy discussion for more than half a century. In their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt depict this support in a negative light. The authors claim that the Israel lobby, acting as an agent of the State of Israel, has seized control of Washington's foreign policy and undermined the American national interest. Particularly damning is the accusation that the lobby pushed the United States into an unnecessary and disastrous war in Iraq.
Political Geography:: Iraq, America, and Israel

757. Chinese Music and its Globalized Past and Present

Author:: Joseph Lam
Publication Date:: 08-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Macalester International
Institution:: Macalester College
Abstract:: In September 2006, I toured China with a group of highly educated and musically sophisticated American businessmen, professionals, and retirees. During the tour, we took a boat ride upstream on the Agricultural Progenitor's Stream (Shennongxi), a tributary of the Yangtze River. There and then, we witnessed boatmen calls and female tour guides singing Chinese ethnic songs and American favorites. Prompted by the tour guides, we also sang, creating American echoes in scenic and tourist China.
Political Geography:: China and America

758. Global (Re)vision: Musical Imagination in African America

Author:: Ingrid Monson
Publication Date:: 08-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Macalester International
Institution:: Macalester College
Abstract:: African American music has always been global, for it would never have come into being without that international trade in human beings known as the Atlantic slave trade. As historians of the slave trade have noted, Americans of African descent came from a variety of ethnic groups primarily from Central and West Africa. Many stopped first in the Caribbean before being transported for sale in various American cities of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In the United States, unlike in the Caribbean, large groups of enslaved Africans from the same cultural group often did not reside together, which resulted in a synthesizing of diverse African cultural practices and values. People taken from what was then known as Senegambia (present day Senegal and Guinea) predominated numerically in the 17th century, but by the end of the North American slave trade approximately 40% of Africans in America came from central Africa (present day Cameroon, Gabon, both Congos, Central African Republic, Angola), 30% from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin (present day Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin), 15% from Senegambia, and 15% from elsewhere on the continent. As Robert Farris Thompson's book Flash of the Spirit noted long ago, many traces of Yoruba, Kongo, and Mande cultural expression, religion, and visual arts can be found in North America.
Political Geography:: Africa, America, North America, and Nigeria

759. Response to Monson - 1

Author:: Miriam Larson
Publication Date:: 08-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Macalester International
Institution:: Macalester College
Abstract:: I am very pleased to have been invited to be part of this Roundtable and it has been a special pleasure to respond to the insights Professor Monson has offered about music and globalization. As a student of music and of critical race studies, I have encountered very little work that brings together these two fields so fluently. In particular, Professor Monson's critical analysis of Malian and African-American music suggests that music participants, including musicians, listeners, businesspeople, and so on, have the potential to change the inequalities that exist in our musical cultures. In my critical race studies courses, the application of critical theory to everyday practice is known as “praxis.” In other words, a frequent discussion question is how to apply critical analysis to everyday life in order to address the inequalities that exist in our world. Unlike many areas in academia, music departments are actively involved in teaching both analytical and technical aspects of musical performance. However, while the proximity of analysis and practice have the potential to form a critical praxis, music students are rarely challenged with reading material that integrates social critique with musical analysis as provocatively as Professor Monson does, and even less frequently are they encouraged to apply this analysis to their playing and performing.
Political Geography:: Africa and America

760. Freight Pain

Author:: Marc Levinson
Publication Date:: 11-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Foreign Affairs
Institution:: Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:: The golden age of globalization is over due to slower, costlier, and less certain transportation. In retrospect, Americans may lament too little globalization, not too much.
Topic:: Globalization
Political Geography:: America

761. Heads in the Sand: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats by Matthew Yglesias

Author:: Brendan Rittenhouse Green
Publication Date:: 09-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The Cato Journal
Institution:: The Cato Institute
Abstract:: Credit where credit is due: At 229 pages, Matthew Yglesias has written the world's longest blog post. The first of a generation of journalists who came to prominence through their personal weblogs, Yglesias now blogs professionally for the Center for American Progress. Heads in the Sand has all the virtues and flaws of the medium Yglesias helped pioneer. It tends toward bite-sized arguments and pith over substance, which leaves some of the chapters with a stapled-together feel. Heads in the Sand gives the impression of a Web journal read straight through, with an extremely thin set of foot-notes substituting for links. Nevertheless, the book is by and large excellent. It is full of wit and erudition, stringing together a series of incisive arguments about politics and foreign policy.
Topic:: Foreign Policy and Politics
Political Geography:: America

762. Palestinian Weddings: Inventing Palestine in New Jersey

Author:: Randa Serhan
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:: Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:: As the political situation of the Palestinians has changed, so too have the customs and practices of Palestinians in the Diaspora. Using Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "invented tradition" as a point of departure, this article explores the origins, functions, and implications of some of the elements-including dance, song, and costume-of Palestinian-American wedding celebrations in the New York/New Jersey/ Pennsylvania area, which since the first intifada have evolved into occasions for celebrating nationalist as well as communal identity.
Political Geography:: New York, America, Palestine, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey

763. Memorandum of understanding between the Department of Defense of the United States of America and the Federal Department of Defense, Civil Protection, and Sports of Switzerland Concerning Cooperation in the Development of an Internet- Based Website, to Support the Work of the Partnership For Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes

Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Connections
Institution:: Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes
Abstract:: This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Department of Defense of the United States of America (hereinafter referred to as “the United States”) and the Federal Department of Defense, Civil Protection, and Sports of Switzerland (hereinafter referred to as “Switzerland”) is in furtherance of the principles established in the Partnership for Peace (PFP) Framework Document adopted by the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels on 10 January 1994.
Political Geography:: United States, America, North Atlantic, and Switzerland

764. Old Paradigms, Challenging Realities, New Interpretations

Author:: José A. Montero
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Institution:: Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Abstract:: Parag Khanna delivers an account of the current contest among America, Europe, and China through the lens of the subjects of the contest—the "Second World."
Topic:: Civil Society, Globalization, Government, and International Affairs
Political Geography:: China, America, and Europe

765. A Different Type of Russian-U.S. Relations

Author:: Alexander Fomenko
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:: East View Information Services
Abstract:: The near half a century of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. and the subsequent 15 years of "NATO enlargement" created in the heads of both the Russians and the Americans a stereotype based on the perception of each other as almost natural geopolitical rivals, doomed to confrontation, if not by geography, then by history.
Political Geography:: Russia, United States, and America

766. The Muslim Presence in France and the United States: Its Consequences for Secularism

Author:: Jocelyne Cesari
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: All too often, the question of Muslim minorities in Europe and America is discussed solely in socioeconomic terms or with a simplistic focus on the Islamic religion and its purported incompatibility with democracy. This article focuses instead on the secularism of Western host societies as a major factor in the integration of Muslim minorities. It compares French and American secularism and argues that while French-style secularism has contributed to present tensions between French Muslims and the French state, American secularism has facilitated the integration of Muslims in the United States-even after 9/11.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Europe

767. Religion, politique et régulation juridique aux États-Unis

Author:: Fabienne Randaxhe
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: From a French perspective, the relationship between the state and religion in the United States may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the American nation was the first one to have established, by constitutional means, a separation between religious bodies and the political realm. On the other hand, religious and political spheres in the US still seem to overlap to some extent. While French approaches tend to regard US laïcité as uncertain and incomplete, this article discusses whether laïcité is in the US incomplete or aware of tensions to be lessened among religious, political and social forces. I focus on legal regulation and consider the notion of accommodation as a particular form of legal laïcité.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: United States and America

768. Book Review: The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again by Peter Beinart

Author:: Marcus A. Roberts
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: Peter Beinart's new book offers the Democratic Party a "new liberalism," a vision he bases on the party's history of moral leadership and success in combating totalitarianism in the post–World War II era. Opposing those who demonize the "liberal" label, Beinart holds up liberalism as the theme by which America achieved national greatness in the past and the means by which it might do so once again—if only the Democratic Party would embrace it fully once more.
Topic:: War
Political Geography:: America

769. The Japan-Mexico FTA: A Cross-Regional Step in the Path towards Asian Regionalism

Author:: Mireya Solís and Saori N. Katada
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: University of British Columbia
Abstract:: By most accounts, Japan and Mexico remain distant economic partners with only a modest volume of bilateral trade and foreign direct investment, and a large geographical and cultural gulf between them. By this depiction, the Japanese decision to negotiate with Mexico is puzzling if not downright nonsensical: Why would Japan invest so much political capital in the negotiation of a complex free trade agreement (FTA) with a nation accounting for such a minuscule share of its international economic exchange? Solís and Katada challenge this interpretation of Japan's second bilateral FTA ever, and demonstrate that far from being irrational or insignificant, the stakes involved in the Japan-Mexico FTA were very high, and that this crossregional initiative stands to exert powerful influence over the future evolution of Japan's shift towards economic regionalism. For a number of Japanese industries (automobiles, electronics and government procurement contractors) negotiating with Mexico was essential to level the playing field vis-à-vis their American and European rivals, which already enjoyed preferential access to the Mexican market based on their FTAs. For the Japanese trade bureaucrats, negotiations with Mexico offered an opportunity to tip the domestic balance in favour of an active FTA diplomacy, despite the opposition of the agricultural lobby. Negotiations with Mexico constituted a litmus test, both for the Japanese government and in the eyes of potential FTA partners in Asia, on whether Japan could offer a satisfactory liberalization package to prospective FTA partners to make these negotiations worthwhile.
Topic:: Diplomacy
Political Geography:: Japan, America, Asia, and Mexico

770. An American in Paris? A Guided Tour of Sarkoland

Author:: Mira Kamdar
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: World Policy Institute
Abstract:: The boundless jubilation on this side of the Atlantic over the recent election of Nicholas Sarkozy as the new president of France says more about the American malaise than it does about the French. True, a record number of voters turned out to help Sarkozy handily beat his opponent, Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent in the second round of the presidential election in May. But, the legislative elections held about one month later demonstrate that French voters may be more wary of Sarkozy than are American observers. Though Sarkozy's party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), maintained a solid majority in the National Assembly, it unexpectedly lost 45 seats. The Socialists, still in the minority, picked up 36 seats. This still leaves the UMP with 314 out of a total of 577 seats, versus the Socialist's 185, and Sarkozy has underlined the fact that he considers himself to have no less of a strong mandate for this disappointing result. However, the legislative elections did produce one major casualty for Sarkozy: the man he had named to run the ambitiously titled new Ministry of Environment, Transportation and Energy, Alain Juppe, lost his seat in Bordeaux and had to resign his post. Sarkozy was forced, under the rules of France's democracy, to dissolve his brand new government and reshuffle his cabinet. This cast an embarrassing shadow over what might otherwise have been a thorough rout, and gave hope to France's Left that not all had been lost.
Political Geography:: America, Paris, and France

771. Red world, Blue world

Author:: Joshua Brook
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: World Policy Institute
Abstract:: Since the 2000 presidential election, political scientists, commentators, and intellectuals have seized on the "red state"/"blue state" divide to explain American politics. The United States is described as a single country with two distinct cultures. Red Americans tend to oppose abortion, regard homosexuality as moral deviance, respect the military, and look kindly on public displays of religious faith. Blue Americans, on the other hand, support environmentalism, abortion rights, gender equality, and gay rights, while opposing militarism and overt displays of patriotism and religious zeal.
Topic:: Globalization, Government, and Political Economy
Political Geography:: United States and America

772. Brown's Britannia, Warts and All

Author:: Karl E. Meyer
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: World Policy Institute
Abstract:: To escape New York's summer heat, my wife and I fled to the United Kingdom, only to plunge from the griddle into the washbasin. “Water levels still rising as thousands hit by worst floods in modern British history,” headlined The Guardian (July 24). As if to make American visitors feel right at home, the adjoining headline elaborated: “Ministers warned three years ago over flood defense failings.” Think of it: here is a country not unused to rain and yet its officials were caught by surprise when a 3-inch surge occurring within 60 minutes turned the Midlands into a lake, leaving as many as 350,000 homes without power and/or water. Yet, in shades of FEMA, Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor government had failed to act on reports in 2004 and 2005 that spoke firmly of the need to overhaul obsolete flood defenses, integrate emergency responses, and coordinate information services.
Political Geography:: New York, United Kingdom, and America

773. Women in America: The Other Fifty Percent

Author:: Christina Bache Fidan
Publication Date:: 04-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: ARI Movement
Abstract:: Historically, if you were not a property owning white male you did not have the right to vote in America. The decision to allow women the right to vote, after a long struggle, in 1920, was a key turning point in the transformation of the American democratic experience. The challenge from then on, of making this right meaningful across America, through changing mindsets and training women, was left, for the most part, on the shoulders of civil society. To secure a higher representation of the national congressional seats in Washington, the Federal Government must reinforce legislation such as affirmative action for gender mainstreaming in all policy areas. The inclusion and empowerment of women in the political arena is of utmost importance to achieving a government that is truly "by the people, for the people."
Topic:: Government
Political Geography:: America and Europe

774. American Religious NGOs in North Korea: A Paradoxical Relationship

Author:: Scott Snyder
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Abstract:: Despite North Korea's antipathy to outside religious influence, it is primarily American NGOs with financial backing from religious organizations that have maintained development and exchange programs with the regime.
Political Geography:: America and North Korea

775. China... from the Sea: The Importance of Chinese Naval History

Author:: Benjamin Armstrong
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: Center for Contemporary Conflict
Abstract:: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, China has become a source of increased focus for military strategists and policy-makers throughout the West and most especially in the United States. With the largest army in the world and obvious aspirations to, at the very least, regional power they mark one of the most significant potential threats to American military supremacy. Studies of China's martial past have been included in the professional reading of many officers in the United States Armed forces. However, there is still one common misperception with regard to China's military history. China, despite what many have written, has an important naval heritage. This heritage may not have been central to the study of Chinese history in the past; however it is important for study in the future. The Chinese government itself has included examples from this history as inspiration for their modern policy and strategy. With this fact in mind it is of vital importance that historians and strategists understand China's naval past.
Political Geography:: United States, China, America, and Soviet Union

776. Forty Years after 242: A "Canonical" Text in Disrepute?

Author:: Richard Falk
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:: Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:: This essay examines the consequences of the near-canonical status acquired over the years by UN Security Council Resolution 242. After tracing the evolution of the vision of peace seen to flow from 242, the essay explores the various ways in which the resolution has been read. In particular, the interpretation of Israel (backed by the United States) is examined, along with the balance of power factor. The essay concludes by suggesting that clinging to 242 as "canonical" inhibits clear-sighted thinking on new approaches that take cognizance of the greatly altered circumstances.
Political Geography:: America, Israel, and California

777. People without Borders for Borders without People: Land, Demography, and Peacemaking under Security Council Resolution 242

Author:: Jamil Dakwar
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:: Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:: UN Security Council Resolution 242, drafted to deal with the consequences of the 1967 war, left the outstanding issues of 1948 unresolved. For the first time, new Israeli conflict-resolution proposals that are in principle based on 242 directly involve Palestinian citizens of Israel. This essay explores these proposals, which reflect Israel's preoccupation with maintaining a significant Jewish majority and center on population and territorial exchanges between Israeli settlements in the West Bank and heavily populated Arab areas inside the green line. After tracing the genesis of the proposals, the essay assesses them from the standpoint of international law.
Topic:: Security and International Law
Political Geography:: New York, America, Middle East, and Israel

778. The Decline of Turkish-American Relations under the Bush Administration and Opportunities for the Final Two Years

Author:: Melissa Maxey
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Insight Turkey
Institution:: SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:: Turkey and the United States are close historic allies. Turkish-American relations have, of course, not been perfect. Two main issues have caused small problems throughout the duration of the partnership. Yet the relationship did begin to change under the administration of American President George W. Bush. The United States must shift its policy toward Turkey to stop the downward direction of relations. It must respond to Turkish internal and external pressures. To succeed it needs to work towards resolutions of current and past problems and allow Turkey to fully develop its own leadership role and position as a prominent member of the Europe and the Middle East.
Political Geography:: United States, America, Europe, and Turkey

779. Will Georgia Go North? On Democracy and Regional Security in the Caucasus

Author:: Lasha Tchantouridze
Publication Date:: 10-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Insight Turkey
Institution:: SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:: The results of the January 5 2008 presidential elections in Georgia will have a long-lasting effect on this emerging democracy, as well as its foreign policy orientation, and on overall stability in the Caucasus. The winner, Mikheil Saakashvili, widely seen as a pro-American and pro-Western politician very keen on the issues of joining NATO and the EU, has in fact done nothing during his first four years in power to secure his country's political independence from Russia or to weaken Moscow's position in the Caucasus. If Saakashvilis's deeds, rather than his words, are examined more carefully, he appears to be more pro-Russian in his foreign orientation rather than pro-Western. It is not entirely unlikely that President Putin of Russia and his Georgian counterpart Saakashvili are staging the hate game between themselves for the benefit of Western observers and their respective domestic audiences. Saakashvili has just managed to secure his second term in office on the anti-Russian ticket, with all the legal and illegal means at his disposal. This will keep his political opposition, whatever is left of the independent news media, and the majority of Georgians actively opposed to him for years to come. If pressured hard by the West, Saakashvili may be forced to make a turn in his foreign policy orientation, and openly choose Moscow as his political overlord. Such a turn of events would have long reaching consequences for the overall stability and security of the Caucasus, as well as for extra-regional links and energy cooperation.
Topic:: Security and Foreign Policy
Political Geography:: America, Caucasus, Moscow, and Georgia

780. Future War: The War on Terror after Iraq

Author:: Adam Elkus
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Athena Intelligence Journal
Institution:: Athena Intelligence
Abstract:: The Bush administration's attempts to portray the War in Iraq as the main front in the War on Terror have become self-fulfilling prophecy. Iraq--like 1980s Afghanistan--has drawn foreign fighters eager to bleed an overextended superpower and acquire valuable combat experience. Because of the global media's fixation on Iraq, it has become the defining symbol of America's violent encounter with Islam. Because of this, it is difficult to predict what form the War on Terror will take when America leaves Iraq.
Political Geography:: Afghanistan, Iraq, and America

781. Demagoguery, Statesmanship, And The American Presidency

Author:: James W. Ceaser
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: Worries about “the rhetorical presidency” ultimately concern the danger of presidential demagoguery. As such, they echo an important theme of the Founders, who erected several barriers to the emergence of the president as demagogue in chief. In the ancient sources on which the Founders partly drew, the worry was the popular or pseudo-popular leader who seizes on widespread envies, fears, or hopes in the service of his political career—in contrast to the statesman, who pursues the public good and is, therefore, less interested in how to gain office than in how to use it. Later iterations emphasized the “superstitious,” “prejudiced,” or ideological nature of demagogic appeals. When Woodrow Wilson proposed that the president should seize the public-policy initiative in the name of the people, he sought to insulate the presidency from charges of demagoguery by arguing that no leader who spoke falsely on behalf of the people could expect to win the office. True adepts of the “progress” of public opinion, hence of the public good, are non-demagogic by definition. Although one is hard pressed to find an American president who can unambiguously be called demagogic, one does find demagoguery among presidential candidates, especially during their campaigns for party nomination.
Political Geography:: America

782. The Rhetorical Presidency and The Contemporary Media Environment

Author:: Susan Herbst
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: Presidential rhetoric can matter immensely in moments of national crisis, and even during times of less melodrama. But the possibilities for rhetorical impact are slipping away from American presidents. In light of the multiplication of presidential spokespeople, commentators, on-line editors, and audiences, and the relative intimacy of other personalities viewed by those audiences, one might posit that “presidential speech,” as described and analyzed by Tulis, is hurtling toward its demise. Tulis's important thesis may therefore need some serious updating.
Political Geography:: America

783. Ppresidents' Party Affiliations and Their Communicatin Strategies

Author:: Mel Laracey
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: More than half of all pre-twentieth century presidents communicated with the public on policy matters. Some gave speeches or wrote public letters and messages, while others utilized the facade of a presidential newspaper. The partisan affiliations of the presidents who communicated with the public suggest that even before the full articulation of the concept of the “rhetorical” presidency by Woodrow Wilson, there was underlying disagreement among American political leaders about the proper role of the public in influencing public policy—and of the role of the president in influencing public opinion.
Political Geography:: America

784. Presidential Rhetoric from Wilson to "W": Popular Politics Meets Recalcritant Reality

Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: With the publication of Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency, Woodrow Wilson's contribution to a major transformation in the American presidency—and in American politics—came to be recognized. But while Wilson believed that the danger of presidential demagoguery was overrated, forms of demagoguery that he underestimated have undermined the legitimacy of America's presidential democracy, in both its Wilsonian, plebiscitary form; and in the rule by decree to which presidents sometimes turn when their rhetoric does not suffice. The basic problem that Wilson overlooked is the mismatch between effective rhetoric and what can actually be accomplished, even by the most popular of presidents.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: America

785. Allegories of Reading Tulis

Author:: Diane Rubenstein
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency is deceptively titled. It is not about rhetoric or political symbolism or even about the American presidency as such, as were many postmodern studies produced in the Reagan era. Rather, Tulis re-situates rhetoric: a minor theme in a story about the presidency becomes an important avenue into profound questions of political order and republican governance. Like Tulis, I approach my thesis obliquely; I distinguish his from other, seemingly similar, works (and realign him with other rhetorical readers, such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida) to underscore what I see as the book's lasting legacy: its explication of the double binds and central paradoxes of republican governance (seen, for example, in presidential prerogative), and its articulation of the role of rhetoric in institutional transformation.
Topic:: Government and Governance
Political Geography:: America

786. "Publicity" And the Progressive-Era Origins of Modern Politics

Author:: Adam D. Sheingate
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: The Rhetorical Presidency places great importance on the transformative power of political ideas. For Tulis, Progressive ideas informed the rhetorical practices of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—practices that reconstituted the American presidency. They did so, in part, by trading on the ambiguous nature of the concept of “publicity”—which at once evoked liberal ideals of public deliberation and transparency, and modern practices of manipulative communication. In turn, the new practices of publicity revolutionized not only the American presidency, but American politics as a whole.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: America

787. The Rhetorical Presidency In Retrospect

Author:: Jeffrey K. Tulis
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: The Rhetorical Presidency is not, principally, a book about rhetoric or the presidency. Rather, rhetoric and the presidency are windows on the American constitutional order as a whole. Critics have greatly enhanced the historical narrative but have not undermined the principal historical and theoretical claims. Recent changes in the American polity are best understood as exacerbations of problems described in the book, rather than as fundamental alterations of our political world. Contemporary political pathologies can still be diagnosed as a product of the contending imperatives of the new constitutional order that has been layered on top of the old one. And while problems may be attenuated by a creative melding of the old and new orders, they cannot be solved within the confines of American constitutionalism, as it has been traditionally understood.
Political Geography:: America

788. American Hegemony Demands a Different Kind of Leadership

Author:: Emiliano Alessandri
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Liberal order and imperial ambition : essays on American power and world politics, G. John Ikenberry, Polity, 2006
Political Geography:: America

789. A New Bi-continental Approach to Transatlantic Defence Cooperation

Author:: Michele Nones
Publication Date:: 06-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: The prospect of transatlantic cooperation in the field of defence systems depends on reaching an acceptable point of equilibrium. Without it, Europe would find the strategic, political, economic, and industrial risks of total American predominance in this field (with the consequent loss of technical and production expertise) unacceptable. The reduction of the gap between Europe and the United States depends on the integration of the European defence market. This must not be seen as a risk for transatlantic collaboration, but as an opportunity. Building up a transatlantic market could also improve the efficiency of the American market by increasing competition. This collaboration, based not on bilateral, national, or multilateral agreements, but instead on bi-continental cooperation, is the challenge that Europe and the United States must face and meet together.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Europe

790. Writing Bush's Legacy Today

Author:: Erik Jones
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: The one percent doctrine : deep inside America's pursuit of its enemies since 9/11, Ron Suskind, Simon Schuster, 2006 and State of denial, Bob Woodward, Simon Schuster, 2006.
Political Geography:: America

791. Wait a Minute - is That an Empire?

Author:: Mario Del Pero
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Among empires : American ascendancy and its predecessors, Charles S. Maier, Harvard University Press, 2006
Political Geography:: America

792. Anti-Americanism and the Formation of the New European Identity

Author:: Emiliano Alessandri
Publication Date:: 09-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: The International Spectator
Institution:: Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:: Review of: Uncouth nation : why Europe dislikes America, Andrei S. Markovits, Princeton University Press, 2007.
Political Geography:: America and Europe

793. The US-ROK Alliance: An American View

Author:: Patrick M. Morgan
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:: International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:: The United States and the ROK have had a very close association for more than fifty years, but in recent years that relationship has experienced considerable stress and strain. Many analysts now express great concern about its future prospects In fact, it is getting more difficult to defend the continued existence of the alliance. The strains are manifest and multiple. The two governments have been living with them for some time, with neither willing to make the strenuous efforts required to either reverse the deterioration or abandon the alliance as incompatible with their contemporary security concerns and perspectives. So the alliance is limping along. As is the security situation on the Korean peninsula that the alliance has existed to deal with – it is limping along as well.
Political Geography:: America

794. A Nuclear Armed Korea as a Factor in Sino-American Relations

Author:: Elizabeth Van Vie Davis
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:: International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:: Few things have changed China's foreign policy toward the United States more subtly than the issue of a nuclear Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea. The catalysts of these events were, on the one hand, the July 5, 2006, long-range missile test and the October 9, 2006, nuclear weapon test. On the other hand, the Six Party Talks that had been designed perhaps to prevent these very events have also been a catalyst to changes in US-China relations. In part these changes in Chinese foreign policy toward the US are because of changes within China itself. Partly these changes in Chinese foreign policy toward the US reflect China's changing role in the international system. And partly they are in response to US policy toward China. The nexus of these three elements has been a more respectful and open relationship between the two powers, but one still fraught with nuances and complexities.
Political Geography:: United States, China, America, and Korea

795. Review Essay -- Of Tour Buses And Politics: American Tourists in France in the Twentieth Century

Author:: Nancy L. Green
Publication Date:: 12-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Tourists take travel seriously (up at 6 a.m., visiting several monuments a day, followed by Paree-by-night). So should historians. Not only because it is one of the world's major industries, but because tourism is at the crossroads of culture and consumption, pleasure and politics. Harvey Levenstein, a cultural historian (first of food, more recently of tourism), and Christopher Endy, a diplomatic historian, have published two very complementary, stimulating, and, gee, fun, books on cross-cultural encounters of a particular type.
Political Geography:: America and France

796. Australia, America and Asia

Author:: Mohan Malik
Publication Date:: 12-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: University of British Columbia
Abstract:: This article examines the changing nature of Australian-American relations in the aftermath of the Iraq imbroglio and China's rise. While many observers see differences in Australian and US approaches toward China as a reflection of different interests, it is the contention of this paper that these different Australian-US perspectives on China are, in fact, premised more on some highly skewed assumptions and fallacious beliefs, misconceptions and myths that have lately come to underlie Australia's China policy than on divergent Australian-US interests. This article looks at the proposition that China's rise has the potential to divide Australia and America but concludes that Beijing is unlikely to succeed in driving a wedge between Washington and Canberra. The shared values and shared strategic interests ensure broad support for the Australia-US alliance in Australia which has now expanded into a global partnership encompassing the transnational security issues as well as the traditional geopolitical issues of managing the rise of new powers.
Topic:: Security
Political Geography:: China, America, Beijing, Asia, and Australia

797. In Medias Res: The Development of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a Security Community

Author:: Marc Lanteigne
Publication Date:: 12-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Institution:: University of British Columbia
Abstract:: As the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation observed its fifth anniversary in June 2006, the question of where the regime fits within the expanding area of international strategic institutions in Asia and elsewhere assumes an even greater importance. The SCO has begun to establish itself as a more formal actor in the complex area of Eurasian security, and has evolved from a largely consultative grouping into a security community. As well, the SCO has become the cornerstone of China's Central Asian diplomacy and its promotion of "non-alliance" forms of strategic cooperation. However, despite the SCO's endeavours to portray itself as a forum for information-sharing and confidence-building, as well as political and economic cooperation, hard power considerations remain an important part of the organisation's policymaking. Although the SCO was seen as marginalized when Western forces entered Central Asia after September 2001, the organisation plays key roles and should not be dismissed as a strategic actor and source of regional cooperation. Moreover, with American forces remaining in Central Asia for the foreseeable future and Central Asian governments becoming increasingly concerned about the potential after-shocks of the recent "colour revolutions" in the former USSR, there is the greater possibility that a more mature SCO may engage in overt power-balancing behaviour vis-à-vis the West, resulting in rivalries rather than cooperation. To prevent this scenario, it is argued that the international community should take the opportunity to better engage the SCO in the name of promoting peace and stability in Eurasia.
Topic:: Government
Political Geography:: China, America, Central Asia, and Eurasia

798. Vicarious Traumas: Television and Public Opinion in Japan's North Korea Policy

Author:: Hyung Gu Lynn
Publication Date:: 09-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Pacific Affairs
Institution:: University of British Columbia
Abstract:: Critiques of American mainstream and conservative media for their often dubious cheerleading of the US war against Iraq have become familiar elements of recent public discourse. However, such analyses have not generated equivalent intellectual engagement with media representations of North Korea. Considering how difficult it has been to obtain accurate information on North Korea, this relative paucity is surprising. I address this lacuna by analyzing the role of the Japanese media, particularly television, in generating public perceptions of North Korea. Why did Japanese television coverage of North Korea reach saturation points following the 9/17 summit? Why were audiences so receptive? How did television shape public opinion? And how did domestic public opinion influence or constrict Japan's North Korea policy? In answering these questions, rather than simply observe that the abductions themselves have been the most important issue in Japan, or note that there have been temporary increases or decreases in Japanese media coverage of North Korea, I argue that television (and other forms of mass media) herded the public into a relatively constricted range of views through narrow, biased saturation coverage of the issue du jour. An intersection of structural concentration, content isomorphism, malleable audiences and domestic policy conflicts allowed the media not only to set agendas, but to prime the audience and frame the presentation of information. Public opinion, maintained by conservative political lobbies, viewer ratings responses and broadcasting strategies, ultimately constricted the government policy agenda, range and choice in dealing with North Korea, generating very predictable behaviours.
Political Geography:: United States, Japan, America, and North Korea

799. What's in a Scarf? The Debate on Laïcité in France

Author:: Nicolas Weill
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The issue of the Islamic headscarf has troubled French society since the end of the 1980s and led to legislation, enacted on 15 March 2004, proscribing the wearing of headscarves or any other "conspicuous" religious symbol in schools. But what strained relationship between the state and religions, and more generally minorities, is hidden by this long controversy that preceded the centennial of the 1905 law separating church and state? This article aims to summarize for American readers the stakes involved in this long debate while putting it into historical perspective by trying to clear up misunderstandings that may crop up in discussions (on both sides of the Atlantic) of a subject where the famous "French exception" seems to be crystallized, that is, the practice of laïcité. Underlying these discussions, one must locate the treatment of religious minorities as put into place during the Napoleonic era in the case of the Jews, which has remained, mutatis mutandis, a model for the organization of Islam in the Hexagon at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such a model is one of an assignment community, organized with the goal, inherited from the Revolution, of emancipating its members and responding to questions of public order.
Topic:: Islam
Political Geography:: America and France

800. The U.S.-ROK Alliance: American Perspectives

Author:: David I. Steinberg
Publication Date:: 09-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:: International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:: Non-specialist Americans, if they think of the Korean Peninsula at all, focus on the crisis that the U.S. faces with North Korea over nuclear and missile issues. Yet there are two crises facing the U.S. in that volatile and dangerous location that has been for two millennia a nexus of regional conflict. The first is the more obvious one with North Korea that the Bush administration has yet seriously to address on a bilateral basis, and still seems unwilling to do so at the highest levels; and the second crisis, a stealth one between South Korea and the U.S.– one that is obscured by both a lack of transparency on relations on the part of both governments and by the media in the United States that has under-reported the issue. The prospect of the Bush-Roh summit did raise its visibility, but the meeting itself and its aftermath were poorly reported in the United States and the subsequent limited official statements lacked depth and implied substantial disagreements. The second crisis with South Korea is arguably as profound as the first for longer-range relations and stability in Northeast Asia. Although both are related, they are not coterminous.
Political Geography:: United States, America, and North Korea

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS