The American public is tired of war. Soon there will be no US forces in Iraq and the scheduled drawdown of troops in Afghanistan is being accelerated. In both cases American field commanders objected to the withdrawals, hoping to preserve tenuously held gains in those conflicts by retaining on site American combat capabilities.
Overreaction in the West and the promotion of China as the next scary thing may seem like a relatively low risk option now that the end of the global war on terror is threatening defense/intelligence budgets and prestige. How China is integrated into the greater world system will define the coming century like no other single issue.
The UN-mandated intervention in Libya is now officially at an end. Perhaps only time will tell whether Libya turns out to have been a great case of international intervention or something rather less.
The moral imperative to intervene in a nation’s internal affairs where acts of genocide are threatened is a powerful one. That the UN is eager to push the doctrine of R2P and to re-define sovereignty to permit intervention in a state’s internal affairs is testimony to the fact that the Charter does not provide that legal authority. It should.
Police brutality is now part of everyday life in Greece. Violence from extreme political circles of all directions is on the rise, and an overall feeling of everyone-against-everyone makes evident the crumbling of Greek society.Thus, the only thing that Greek Police seem to be good at is to provoke indignation.
Traditionally perceived as continental powers, Russia and China are increasingly looking to invest significantly in the development of their maritime capabilities, most notably through the development and deployment of aircraft carriers. This reflects an aspiration broader than that of simply enhancing their respective naval strength.
A simple sentence could summarize almost a decade of negotiations, both political and economic, over a field that has not brought a single drop of oil to the surface: “No oil, plenty of ink”. The case of Kurmangazy, an oil field which lies about half way between the Russian and the Kazakh coasts, helps us understand the multidisciplinarity and the importance of the role of energy in foreign policy decision-making.
I prefer to call it Restraint, but let’s be clear, by whatever label America is pulling back. The oceans are big and protect America from much of the world’s turmoil. Being on American side of them is cheaper than being on the other side and wiser too. America is coming home thanks to the government’s budget deficit.
Recent years have seen the intensification of political tensions between various states in the Pacific and East Asia. The rise of China as a military and economic power has necessarily triggered concern in the region, causing nations to reexamine their air-power procurement and development plans.
Motivated both by analytical rigor and political expediency, ICISS sandwiched its discussion of international response to atrocities between what it described as a “responsibility to prevent” and a “responsibility to rebuild.” Once introduced, however, the logic of prevention as core to the global atrocity agenda was difficult to deny. Why wait to halt a massacre if early engagement might avert it entirely?
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