By: Neeta Lal | Briefing
Against the backdrop of a sputtering economy and a spate of scandals battering India's global image, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is in Washington today. The visit -- touted as a damage-control and public relations initiative -- will see the senior minister meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and industry leaders to reinforce the message that India remains an attractive investment destination.
By: Thomas P.M. Barnett | Column
While the Obama administration has rightly committed to participating in NATO's Libyan operation, it allows misapprehensions about what Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's fall would mean for the Middle East to prevent America from doing more to expedite a capitulation in Damascus. The primary culprit: the notion that the status quo in Syria and, by extension, Lebanon is better served by Assad remaining in power.
By: Nikolas Gvosdev | Feature
Despite all the favorable rhetoric regarding the responsibility to protect, governments continue to hesitate to embrace the doctrine. Some experts have argued that the intervention in Libya earlier this year is a sign that this hesitation is giving way to a new willingness to act on the part of the international community. I do not share this optimistic assessment.
By: Iain Mills | Briefing
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping's recent three-country tour of Latin America was aimed at addressing concerns over the asymmetric and one-dimensional nature of China's relations in the region, which generally conform to the classic center-periphery model. Xi's visit outlined a blueprint for how China's incoming leadership intends to deepen its international relations and consolidate recent economic foreign policy gains.
By: Matthew Hulbert | Briefing
With OPEC unable to agree on a price target at its latest meeting, the International Energy Agency (IEA) decided to release 60 million barrels of strategic reserves. As a result, markets have little idea how to set prices. The IEA is playing a dangerous game in seeking to influence short-term sentiment by putting more oil on the market when supplies are not tight enough to justify such a move.
By: Richard Weitz | Column
The triple catastrophe represented by Japan's March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency has thus far had two main effects on Japan's national security policies. First, it has focused attention toward domestic disaster relief operations. Second, it has reinforced the Japanese-U.S. alliance. Given the increased salience of external threats, Japan's domestic preoccupation may prove to be of short duration.
By: Robert Jackson | Feature
By advocating an international responsibility to protect civilian populations from all who might threaten or harm them from within their own countries, including their governments, R2P proponents assert what amounts to a revision of the U.N. Charter at its most vital war-authorizing point. It is worth examining the assumptions of the doctrine, however, and the consequences of applying it in practice.
By: Thomas G. Weiss | Feature
With the exception of Raphael Lemkin's efforts that resulted in the 1948 Genocide Convention, no idea has moved faster than the responsibility to protect in the international normative arena. "A blink of the eye in the history of ideas," concluded Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and past president of the International Crisis Group. What happened to the sacrosanct principle of state sovereignty?
By: Daniel Larison | Feature
The ongoing U.S. and NATO military intervention against the Libyan government has become the first test case for the responsibility to protect doctrine since U.N. member states approved it in 2005. However, the manner in which the doctrine was used to authorize and carry out collective action against Moammar Gadhafi's regime has undermined the integrity and credibility of the doctrine in the future.
By: Martin S. Edwards | Briefing
Many observers stressed the need for a non-European at the head of the IMF in order to relegitimize the fund. Now that French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has been named managing director, how she handles the fund's day-to-day operations will determine whether it slides into irrelevance. Maintaining some continuity with the Strauss-Kahn era, while breaking with it on Greece, may boost the IMF's legitimacy.
By: Patrick Corcoran | Briefing
Mexico's next major political milestone, the 2012 presidential election, is still off on the horizon, but for the impatient, Sunday's gubernatorial contest in Mexico state offers a sneak preview of what to expect a year from now. The closely watched race's biggest winner will likely be a man who is not even running: Enrique Peña Nieto, the presumptive favorite to succeed Felipe Calderón as president next year.
By: Frida Ghitis | Column
For decades, Turkey was one of the few Muslim nations that had good relations with Israel, but the relationship has deteriorated over the past few years. Now, with politicians in both countries having scored points over the rift, calculations on both sides point to the benefits of rapprochement. As a result, Israel and Turkey are working quietly to mend a relationship that was once a mainstay of East-West diplomacy.
By: Luke Hunt | Briefing
A U.N.-backed court in Cambodia has begun its initial hearings into war crimes allegations with mixed success and predictions of a long road ahead for a tribunal described as more complex than the Nuremberg trials. Its importance was underscored by the United States ambassador at large for war crime issues, Stephen Rapp, who called the Khmer Rouge tribunal "the most important trial in the world."
By: Nikolas Gvosdev | Column
Instead of pursuing grandiose schemes for a U.S.-Russia strategic partnership, the Obama and Medvedev administrations have focused efforts on small-scale projects, to build up the habits of cooperation between the two countries. Ironically, Afghanistan, which two decades ago was one of the Cold War's principal geopolitical battlefields, is now one of the areas where the "reset" is showing the most concrete results.
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