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Despite the collapse of the Doha trade talks this week, the global food crisis is creating the basis for longer term progress on a new agricultural trade regime. Key differences over agriculture as well as manufacturing and services trade seemingly stymied a final deal, but progress on farm talks bodes well for an eventual pact that better reflects the needs of developing countries and the poor.
John McCain continues to rely on neoconservative foreign policy advisers and he still thinks U.S. foreign policy should focus on transforming rogue states and autocracies into democracies that live under the shadow of American power. But such a plan would create gratuitous tensions with countries like Russia and China.
For a meeting dubbed the "World Economic Forum" (WEF), Davos isn't nearly cosmopolitan enough. Of the 6,000 or so people who make up the top of the world's power pyramid, about one-third were from Asia, and that number is increasing on an almost daily basis. But, despite tectonic shifts in world markets and politics, Asian attendance at Davos remains disproportionately low.
Despite President Bush’s 2001 commitment to supply Taiwan with U.S. military equipment for its self defense, the administration froze the final part of the arms deal last week. The deal should move forward, not only to support a democratic ally whose leader is committed to improving cross-straits relations, but also as a pragmatic step toward balancing China’s military build-up.
Decision time has arrived on the controversial nuclear cooperation proposal that was first proposed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in July 2005. Because the NSG and IAEA traditionally operate by consensus, any one of a number of states can act to block or modify the ill-conceived arrangement. They have good reason and a responsibility to do so.
The Bush administration's Freedom Agenda - an undertaking rich in rhetoric and bombast and poor on substance - has been an unqualified disaster. It has not helped bring about change in the region, but it has undermined American credibility. Yet the next administration in the United States must not succumb to the temptation to simply dismiss the idea of democracy promotion in the Middle East.
Robert Kagan believes a war is coming. Not necessarily one with guns and bombs, but his new book argues that a fundamental global divide is emerging between liberal democracies and autocratic governments—namely Russia and China. He and presidential hopeful John McCain call for a League of Democracies, which the Republican candidate has pledged to pursue if he wins the November election. NEWSWEEK's Christopher Werth spoke with Kagan about the ascendancy of great-power competition.
America has elected a president from a once-marginalized social group before. But the country has rejected such a candidate, too. Barack Obama represents a social group that was once on the margins of American politics, but now aspires to put one of its own in the highest office. This has happened once before in U.S. politics: when American Catholics saw one of their own nominated to be president.
The conventional wisdom today is that a small group of neoconservatives seized the occasion of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 to steer the nation into a war that would never have been fought otherwise. There is another and arguably simpler interpretation: that after September 11, 2001, American fears were elevated and their tolerance for potential threats lowered.
The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.
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