The World Cup and Baseball →

The World Cup is an important global event in which the US usually plays a very peripheral role. That was certainly the case this year as the US made it out of their group but lost in the Round of 16. The World Cup inevitably draws contrasts between soccer's global even universal popularity and the American people's stubborn preference for baseball. This is, of course, a false contrast as baseball is popular in much East Asia, the Caribbean and increasingly in a few other countries besides the US. Soccer, while the world's most popular sport, has failed to catch on in many parts of South Asia and is one of several popular sports in Australia, parts of East Asia and North America.

Read More Info

Comment

Does Mitt Romney Really Think Europe is the Enemy

While Romney is not the first Republican to use anti-European rhetoric in this manner, he is also no longer just a Republican politician. He is one of the two people most likely to be president of the U.S. in 53 weeks. Coming from a potential president, these kinds of jibes against Europe should be seen differently. Romney may legitimately believe that European style social democracy is bad for the U.S., or as is more likely, believe that caricaturing European policies is much easier than explaining his party’s policies of anti-poor class warfare of the last generation. Nonetheless, it is very dangerous for an American president to not have a full understanding of the value of the U.S. relationship with many European countries, or to jeopardize that relationship through over-heated campaign slogans.

Read More Info

Comment

Revolution and Democracy in Egypt

History has shown both that revolutions are rare and not the inevitable outcome of large, even massive street demonstrations, and that when most authoritarian regimes are overthrown, they are not replaced by democracies. Moreover, while some democracies, notably those in countries of Eastern Europe like Poland or the Czech Republic as well as the Baltic states arise out of events that could be described as revolutions, most democracies take a very long time to evolve. The American democratic revolution, for example, lasted roughly two centuries beginning with the American Revolution in 1776 which brought independence, followed a few years later by the creation and approval of the U.S. Constitution, and ending when apartheid in the American south was brought to an end with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. Some other democracies, Germany and Japan, for example, grew out of military defeat, occupation and enormous commitment of resources from other democratic countries.

Read More Info

Comment

Richard Holbrooke and American Empire

Richard Holbrooke’s death this week at the age of 69 brings to a close one of the most extraordinary diplomatic careers in American history. Holbrooke’s career began in 1962 and continued until his death. During these years, not only did Holbrooke work for every Democratic president from Kennedy to Obama, but he was involved in one way or another with many of the most important foreign policy issues facing the U.S. including the war in Vietnam, the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan, during a career of nearly fifty years.

Read More Info

Comment

Angela Merkel and the Failure of Multiculturalism

Believing that multi-culturalism has failed in your society, even if you are the chancellor, is not a policy prescription, it is a complaint. It may be a widespread complaint, but it is little more than that. Multi-culturalism is not an “approach” to use Merkel’s word, nor is it some kind of experiment created by well-meaning liberals, it is simply part of the reality of today’s Europe, and much of the world. The tone of Merkel’s complaint may have overshadowed that at least one part of her observation, that Germany has not handled this new reality well, is probably true.

Read More Info

Comment

The Illogic of the War in Afghanistan

Whether or not the article is right or wrong about Yemen is of secondary import. The more important issue is that there almost certainly will be another Afghanistan somewhere in the world. There are too many failing states with an Islamist presence, in which Al Qaeda could operate, for this not to be the case. This reality demonstrates the poor logic of the continued U.S. effort in Afghanistan. For the most part opposition to the war in Afghanistan has argued that the U.S. cannot achieve its goals there or that the cost of achieving those goals is too high. The New York Times article raises a different, but probably more important point-even on the off-chance that U.S. goals are achieved in Afghanistan, it won’t really matter because the terrorists will move somewhere else, most likely Yemen.

Read More Info

Comment

Why Is the World Cup Coverage So Full of Stereotypes?

Every World Cup, even through my very casual observance, I am struck by how in this extraordinarily international tournament that seems, in real ways, to bring the world together, national stereotypes still characterize, and at times even dominate coverage of the games. German teams are often described using terms such as “efficient” or “ruthless,” Brazilians as playing with flare, excitement, “razzle dazzle,” and the like. It is possible, although I wouldn’t know, that these descriptions are accurate, but it seems significant that they are consistent with existing national stereotypes. One half expects the American team to be described as arrogant or one of the Asian teams as inscrutable. This reliance on essentially national stereotypes to describe how the game is played, at least to the non-expert ear, makes it seem as if a major global event is being presented with the political sensitivities of the bridge of the USS Enterprise.

Read More Info

Comment

Five New Foreign Policy Challenges for the New Decade

During the next ten years, the U.S. will confront a broad range of policy challenges. Some will likely be largely unchanged over the course of the decade. Others, like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the fight against terrorism will probably remain important issues but will change and evolve during the decade. There are some issues, however, which seem somewhat remote today, but which may dominate headlines by the year 2020. We cannot, of course, know for certain what these issues are, but the five issues below all may become very important by 2020.

Read More Info

Comment

Eastern Europe and the Obama Administration

Citizens and leaders in Eastern Europe cannot be faulted for being worried about Russian policy in the region, particularly given the aftermath of the Russia-Georgia War of 2008. However, there is a danger of several issues being conflated with this fear. The serious concerns about Russia often contribute to a somewhat unfounded fear that the US is going to abandon its allies and principles in Eastern Europe as part of its goal of “resetting” relations with Russia. This fear is not always rational and has not been assuaged by anything President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton or others in the administration have said about the refusal of the U.S. to make any tradeoffs of this kind.

Read More Info

Comment

Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, How We Misremember the Cold War

The Cold War was the organizing principle of American foreign policy, and had a strong influence on domestic policy as well, for almost half a century. Today, less than two decades after its end, the Cold War is poorly remembered. The equivalence which some have suggested between the threat of Jihadist terror and that represented by the USSR, and the almost ubiquitous comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Stalin from those trying to drum up support for the Iraq war are just some examples of this. These comparisons are not so much wildly inaccurate, Jihadist terror represents a real threat to the U.S., and Hussein was much worse than your garden variety dictator, but they betray an intellectual laziness and failure to understand the true nature, and, for quite a long time, power of the Soviet regime.

Read More Info

Comment

Why Calling Countries "Strategically Important" is Hurting US Foreign Policy

There’s also some truth to this. All countries, particularly from America’s point of view, have some strategic value. The problem with this approach is that if all countries have strategic importance, then no country has strategic importance and all countries are of equal import. Strategic value only has meaning if it is a relative term, and referring to a country as strategically important only means something if it is considered more or less strategic than other countries.

Read More Info

Comment

Obama and the G-20 →

The story is not, for many reasons, quite as simple as this. The G20 Summit is occurring in the midst of a global economic crisis of historic proportions, one which raises important, although far from identical, problems for all of the countries participating in the summit. Due to the impact of the downturn in the US and the effect on the rest of the world of the American bubble bursting, Obama is forced into a very strange position, one that is part rock star and part Dr. Doom. The American president whose personal story and style exudes optimism will be, to a substantial extent, playing the role of pessimist, or realist, at the summit, as he must not seek to minimize the seriousness of the economic problems we all face.

Read More Info

Comment