Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Speaking of decrepit New York City landmarks, Mark Leon Goldberg reports on a major renovation of the 50-year-old United Nations building, which would have condemned “long ago if not for the fact that it falls under international jurisdiction.” According to the UN News Centre, the current buildings are “plagued by leaks, safety violations and outdated [...]
In the cover story of the new American Prospect, Matt Yglesias describes John McCain thusly: The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he “hates war,” not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He’s [...]
Fareed Zakaria argues that John McCain’s foreign policy would be bellicose whereas Barack Obama’s would be conciliatiatory but, as Dave Schuler notes, both are “confrontational” and “interventionist,” just with slightly different priorities. Zakaria points to a recent McCain speech: Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in [...]
During a major foreign policy address yesterday, John McCain talked about his plan to create a League of Democracies. Charles Krauthammer sees a plot to do away with the United Nations: Well, I like the idea of the league of democracies, and only in part because I and others had proposed it about six years [...]
Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, warns that the rapidly escalating price of food is increasing world hunger. The prices of basic staples — wheat, corn, rice — are at record highs, up 50 percent or more in the past six months. Global food stocks are at historic lows. The causes range from rising demand [...]
As expected, Russia is not pleased with Kosovo’s secession from Serbia. Russia denounced Kosovo’s independence declaration Sunday, warning that the move threatened to ignite a new conflict in the Balkans and calling on NATO and U.N. officials in the territory to nix the decision. Russia requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which held [...]
Russia has began delivery of nuclear fuel to Iran, defying UN resolutions calling on Iran to give up its nuclear enrichment program. Russia on Monday announced the start of nuclear fuel deliveries for Iran’s first atomic power station, brushing aside US and Israeli claims that Tehran harbours secret bomb-making plans. “On December 16, 2007, Atomstroiexport [...]
Dave Schuler wins Line of the Day honors for this comment on Alex Knapp’s post about the differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policies: There’s a razor’s edge between greater reliance on international institutions and “let George do it”. I’m personally and professionally committed to the use of international institutions, particularly NATO and various [...]
Joe Nye, the premier soft power theorist, defends the United Nations from its critics from the Right, arguing they don’t understand the value of international legitimacy. After the failure of the League of Nations in the 1930’s, the UN was designed to have the Security Council’s permanent members act as policemen to enforce collective security. [...]
The global AIDS crisis is less dire than it has been portrayed, the UN admits. The United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency plans to issue a report today acknowledging that it overestimated the size of the epidemic and that new infections with the deadly virus have been dropping each year since they peaked in the late 1990s. [...]
The latest UN effort to bring peace to Darfur could fail before it starts for want of some trucks and helicopters. The joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur may fail unless countries can provide helicopters and lorries, a top UN official says. Foot-dragging by Sudan over the make-up of the force could also threaten [...]
The United Nations Foundation has released a new survey showing that Americans overwhelmingly prefer multilateral solutions to foreign policy issues. Mark Leon Goldberg provides an executive summary: The United Nations Foundation released the results of a major survey of Americans’ foreign policy attitudes today. Americans, the poll finds, are virtually unanimous (86% of all voters) [...]
Foreign Affairs has, over the last several issues, had one major Republican and one major Democrat publish an essay under their name outlining the foreign policy agenda they would pursue if elected president. Bill Richardson was either tired of waiting or figured he wouldn’t be asked, so instead published his in the latest issue of [...]
In a conference call with bloggers this morning, Senator John McCain argued that the United States should convene a League of Democracies to get friendly nations to put more severe pressure on Iran. I was able to get in the first question and followed up on this idea, asking whether he was talking about a [...]
Former Vice President Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it. Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a [...]
Greg Djerejian reacts to a Bloomberg report that NATO is having trouble sustaining its mission in Afghanistan by wondering what NATO is doing there to begin with. [N]ot a single one of the original signatories in a million years would have imagined half a century on that [the "armed attack against one or more of [...]
Sudan is on the verge of yet another cease-fire. Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir said Friday his government is ready to implement a cease-fire with rebel forces at the start of peace talks over the conflict in Darfur, scheduled for next month in Libya. It was the first time al-Bashir — in Italy to meet with [...]
French President Nicolas Sarkozy caused quite a stir by raising the specter of bombing Iran to prevent it becoming a nuclear weapon state. The biggest challenge to the world was the avoidance of conflict between Islam and the West, President Sarkozy told the annual gathering of French ambassadors. Iran was the crossroads of the Middle [...]
Ace of Spades guest Jack M. links a two-and-a-half-year-old story about U.N. peacekeepers committing sex crimes in Congo as part 1 in a 5 part series on “International Law: Why it sucks, why people shouldn’t buy into it, and why it should be abandoned.” In that spirit, I will use his post as the first [...]
Dan Drezner weighs in, again, in the cross-blog debate on the extent to which states, especially powerful ones like the United States, are constrained by international law. He cites a post by Henry Farrell that’s pretty similar in substance to the version I taught students in my Intro to IR classes. The key ‘graph: The [...]
John Quiggin ponders Dan Drezner’s formulation that, “The number one rule of the bi-partisan foreign policy community is that America can invade and attack other countries when vital American interests are threatened. Paying homage to that orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining good standing within the foreign policy community.” Quiggin observes, Unless “vital national [...]
The United Nations will step up its efforts in Iraq after a four year hiatus. The Security Council voted Friday to expand the United Nations’ role in Iraq in a move aimed at promoting talks among ethnic and religious rivals and winning support from the country’s neighbors. The resolution, approved unanimously, authorizes the U.N., at [...]
Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom that the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan will make it incredibly unlikely that an American president will dispatch the military overseas anytime soon, there is a bipartisan consensus for interventionism. Despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world’s dominant military power, [...]
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton writes an open letter to the Brits telling them, essentially, that they must choose between the United States and the European Union. [S]aying that the UK’s “single most important bilateral relationship” is with America, but is not comparable with UK membership of the EU, is a clever but ultimately meaningless [...]
The U.N. has suffered yet another rape scandal, this time involving Moroccan soldiers and Ivory Coast girls. “It means they don’t participate in our operations,” said Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Cote d’Ivoire (ONUCI). “Those who are found guilty will be sent back home.” The world body said the measure was in [...]
It’s official: Gordon Brown is the new PM. Former Treasury chief Gordon Brown became British prime minister Wednesday, promising “a new government with new priorities,” after Tony Blair left office with a legacy of economic prosperity overshadowed by the deeply divisive Iraq war. Power changed hands traditionally and quietly behind closed doors in Buckingham Palace [...]
Kurt Waldheim has died. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, whose legacy as head of the world body was overshadowed by revelations that he belonged to a German army unit that committed atrocities in the Balkans in World War II, died Thursday. He was 88. Waldheim, who was hospitalized in Vienna last month with an infection, [...]
The UN peacekeepers in Darfur are having many of the same difficulties currently being encountered by Coalition forces in Iraq. Christian Science Monitor staff writer Scott Baldauf explains: Deteriorating security conditions in Darfur — a vast region of Sudan that is equal in size to France — are endangering the largest humanitarian aid operation in [...]
Eager to put the embarrassment of the Paul Wolfowitz brouhaha behind him, President Bush “will have a candidate to announce soon, allowing for an orderly transition that will have the World Bank refocused on its mission.” AP reports that, “Among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Wolfowitz were former Deputy Secretary of State Robert [...]
Kirit Radia and Brian Ross report that Paul Wolfowitz will resign as president of the World Bank later this afternoon. World Bank officials say the bank’s board is completing an “exit strategy” that will allow World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to resign this afternoon and “still save some face” over the issue of his efforts [...]
Economic sanctions are almost always an ineffective way of achieving foreign policy goals. As we have seen in places like Iraq, North Korea, and, especially, Cuba, cutting off trade tends to make innocent civilians suffer while actually bolstering the regime, who now has a ready scapegoat for all the society’s ills. Well-targeted sanctions, though, can [...]
Christopher Hitchens believes that Paul Wolfowitz and, by extension, Shaha Riza, have been “slimed” as a result of the “eagerness for prurience, the readiness for slander, and the utter want of fact-checking” of the press corps. Indeed, not only did they do nothing wrong but they acted extraordinarily honorably. Anyone in Washington who cares about [...]
Paul Wolfowitz’s tenure as president of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (better known as the World Bank) appears about to end after a scandal over preferential treatment of his girlfriend. The bank’s staff association and the Financial Times are calling for his resignation, which I suspect will coon be forthcoming. AP’s Jeannine Aversa [...]
Via Ezra Klein, I see that UNICEF has published its annual “State of the World’s Children” report (PDF available here). It’s subtitle gives you a good clue of the contents: “Women and Children: The Double Dividend of Gender Equality.” Not surprisingly, women’s rights are strongest in the most prosperous societies. The causal relationship is debatable, [...]
Fred Thompson (or, more likely, a staffer) made his blogging debut at Redstate yesterday afternoon, warning of the dangers of the propaganda victory Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got from taking 15 British marines hostage. He is disgusted with the weakness shown by the international community in this affair: “The UN Security Council summoned its vaunted multilateral greatness [...]
Thomas Harding, the London Daily Telegraph‘s Defence Correspondent, argues that the British government has few viable options in its attempt to force Iran to return the 15 marines it is holding hostage. “Military action is unfeasible without American support and so is a military blockade of the Gulf. Unless the United Nations shows more rigour, [...]
Foreign Policy‘s Michael Cognato says that, with its vote this week to end its examination of the worsening conditions in Iran and Uzbekistan, the “U.N. Human Rights Council is now officially a joke.” The sad irony is, the Council was actually conceived as an alternative to the now-defunct Human Rights Committee, which had been widely [...]
Iran ‘to try Britons for espionage’-News-World-Middle East-TimesOnline FIFTEEN British sailors and marines arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards off the coast of Iraq may be charged with spying. A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted. Referring to them [...]
Iran has stepped up its rhetoric in its ongoing clash with the international community over its nuclear program. Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Wednesday the country will pursue nuclear activities outside international regulations if the U.N. Security Council insists it stop uranium enrichment. “Until today, what we have done has been in accordance [...]
Jim Henley argues Congress should investigate executive claims that Iran is providing advanced weaponry to our enemies in Iraq and, if true, go to the UN and demand action. I would point out that we’ve had more luck in recent years getting France to take decisive action. The UN is useful for a lot of [...]
The United Nations is sending its first-ever all-female peacekeeping force to Liberia. The United Nation’s first all-female peacekeeping force — made up of 105 Indian policewomen — is set to deploy to the troubled west African country of Liberia, an official said Friday. The team, which has been training since September, leaves for Liberia on [...]
Benon Sevan, who headed up the UN’s Oil-for-Food program, has been indicted on charges of taking bribes from Saddam Hussein. The charges, detailed in a joint press release by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Manhattan district attorney, came over a year after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker completed an investigation for [...]
U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad is going to be nominated to replace John Bolton as U.N. ambassador and Ryan Crocker, currently the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, will be nominated to replace Khalilzad in Baghdad later today. This continues a significant shake-up of the foreign policy staff including the replacement of Don Rumsfeld with Bob [...]
I’ve long noted the irony that neo-conservatism is the furthest thing from conservatism. In fact, it is the logical successor to Woodrow Wilson’s imperialistic vision. John Ikenberry uses the just-past 150th anniversary of Wilson’s birth and impending 88th anniversary of his 14 Points speech to reflect on the legacy of the 28th President of the [...]
The fact that a sick 91-year-old man who left power by democratic means sixteen years ago died barely captured my attention over the weekend. The irony, noted by Blake Hounshell, that it happened to be the 58th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is worth noting, however. I was also somewhat amused this [...]
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, has died. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a conservative political scientist who became the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, died at her home outside Washington late Thursday, colleagues announced today. She was 80. A notice of her death was posted this morning on the Web [...]
Bill Richardson has announced his candidacy for president, on Fox News of all places. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is expected to formally file papers to form a presidential exploratory committee in January. But today he told FOX News “I am running,” as he described the professional and personal experiences that he believes have prepared [...]
Andrew Sullivan: “National Review is touting Rick Santorum as U.N. ambassador. You cannot make this stuff up.” Indeed. As a general rule, politicians who are badly defeated in their re-election bids are not ideal candidates for controversial appointments. The NRO gang loves, Santorum, though, with Kathryn Jean Lopez having touted him for SECDEF less than [...]