Critics have deplored President Bush’s announcement over the weekend of his intent to attend the Beijing Olympics because of China’s poor human rights record and unfulfilled promises to the International Olympic Committee to liberalize before the Games. This is a wrong-headed view. The President should attend the opening ceremonies in August, and have a great time rooting for American athletes.
The political and humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe continues to cause great concern. This article considers whether R2P offers a framework for a national and, if necessary, an international response to the crisis. It is argued the UN has other diplomatic tools which could be more effective at this stage.
Last week, the National War Powers Commission published its report on how to fix war powers. The Commission notes that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 has been monumentally ineffective at resolving fundamental questions — both constitutional and political — of war powers.
There is some irony in the criticism of ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo for issuing his request for a warrant of arrest for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was previously criticised for moving too slowly and for not targeting high levels of the government. How sensitive to a politics of consequence, then, should the Prosecutor be?
In October 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) replaced the Republic of China (ROC) after the Chinese Communists won a nationwide victory in the civil war and drove the Nationalist government to Taiwan. A Communist China, comprising a quarter of the world’s population, had inevitably extended the Cold War to East Asia. The PRC’s foreign policy during the Cold War went through several distinctive stages.
For the first time since 1952, neither an incumbent president nor a vice president of the incumbent’s party is running for the White House in the US presidential election of 2008. The 2008 election and its outcome thus represent something of an unknown quantity not only to the American electorate, but to the rest of the world as well.
The election of America’s first African-American president would excite enormous expectation in Europe, and, at least temporarily, reverse much of the hostility to US foreign policy which has been generated over the last six or so years. But how much change should we expect from Obama’s foreign policy?
After thirty years of stability, staple food prices have increased on average by 43% in world markets this year and 80% since 2005. The fastest rising commodity, wheat, was $105 a tonne in 2000 and now costs $481. This is of enormous concern in less developed countries (LDCs), but are there also opportunities present for poor farmers?
This comment considers some implications of territoriality (and deterritoralisation) as they affect global politics and as they impact states’ policies towards global politics. A special emphasis will be put upon a security perspective, namely on transnational terrorism and subsequently on imperatives for counter-terrorism policies.
In many ways geopolitics is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be thought about; it’s the taken for granted arrangement of things that provides the context for policy making. Except that what it most obvious in how we understand the world isn’t necessarily the only way things can be understood. Given dominant geopolitical specifications in the White House then, what are the prospects for an attack on Iran?
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