Secretary of State Condi Rice and President George Bush made news this week by calling for global action to prevent global warming. However, neither one even really hinted at caps, limits, or mandatory cuts in so-called greenhouse gases. Secretary Rice kicked off the...
Source: Mandalay GazetteAfter nine days of mass, peaceful protests in Myanmar, the crackdown has begun. Government troops have beaten demonstrators and fired tear gas and live bullets. The...
Putin has named his new cabinet. Despite heated speculation in the media, the changes are fairly small. Almost all the ministers kept their jobs. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin kept his post, but...
Source: Mandalay GazetteThe revolution may not be televised, but you can rest assured that it will be blogged. The large scale protests continue, despite yesterday's threats. The ruling military...
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a fascinating speech Monday to the World Forum on the Future of Democracy addressing "a 'realist's' view of promoting democracy abroad."The whole speech is worth reading (here). In it, Gates reflects on the longstanding debate between the "realists" and "idealists" in US Foreign Policy. It is very closely related to the great debate between Liberals and Realists in IR Theory. It also happens that many Intro IR and Intro to IR Theory classes (such as mine this semester) are covering these very topics right now.In IR theory, we like to look back to...
Something is brewing in the Middle East that merits close attention, because the more we learn about it, the more intriguing it becomes. It also brings home some chickens to roost, so to speak, for earlier Bush Administration foreign policy failures.Last week, Israel launched a highly secret air-strike deep into Syria. Despite the fact that Israel and Syria share a border (the direct route), the squadron of Israeli F-15's flew over the Med, through Turkey (a very close Israeli military ally), and dropped significant ordinance onto a Syrian target. The entire operation has been cloaked in...
The September Atlantic had a brief note in its Primary Sources section about how "Terrorists are turning more and more to crime to fund violence." The piece references a Congressional Research Service report that apparently included "bootlegging Viagra" as one source of income.I guess they've moved on from infant formula. In any case, I did a bit of searching around and found this MSNBC/Newsweek piece from August 2006, which describes an alleged criminal ring in Detroit that was funneling funds to Hizbullah in 2002:By 2002, Hammoud and some of his colleagues were believed to be running...
No, I don't know what to make of this either:In a meeting with the Valdai Discussion Group, a group of academics and journalists, in the Black Sea town of Sochi (now best known for its successful Olympic bid), Vladimir Putin commented, "Now, at least five people are named who can really stake their claim to be elected president in March 2008. Well, if another real candidate appears, then the Russian people will be able to choose among several people." The only person (other than opposition candidates without a prayer) who has explicitly expressed interest in running is Viktor Zubkov (who, as...
The Duma hasn't even confirmed Viktor Zubkov as Russia's new prime minister, and already he's raising eyebrows. Early commentary on Zubkov pegged him as a quietly competent bureaucrat who was unlikely to make waves or alter the balance of the intra-Kremlin jockeying over succession.But it's so much fun to confound the pundits: today Zubkov told reporters that a run for the presidency is not off the table. So who is this mysterious fellow?Here's a summary from the various bios floating around the media. Like former president Yeltsin, he's originally from the Sverdlovsk region in the southern...
I like Foreign Policy's Passport blog. I really do. But this kind of thing BUGS the living daylights out of me. They have a perfectly good post on a bizarre attempt by a Russian regional governor to increase the local birthrate. And it's illustrated with a stock photo of a rather bizarre postage stamp commemorating the "Week of the Child". At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it says. The reason I'm not totally positive?The stamp is from Yugoslavia. It's in Serbian, which is written in Cyrillic, and, of course, has much similarity to Russian, but isn't Russian. The bottom of the stamp reads...
Update below the fold--Ivanov is not the new PM.Reuters is reporting that Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov has stepped down. No replacement has yet been named, though Vedomosti is reporting that First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov is the most likely candidate.Prime ministers may come and go, but this is big news because of the open question: who will be the next president of Russia. While I wouldn't be entirely shocked if there was a sudden domestic crisis that necessitated a third term from Vladimir Putin, most Russia watchers believe that he wants to hand off the open reins of...
General Petraeus finished delivering his prepared remarks to the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees not long ago -- and I've already been interviewed about them by the local NPR station (WFPL).Basically, I concluded that his report was not surprising. Most analysts expected an optimistic assessment that would not call for a substantial reduction in American troops. The General is only talking about returning the US troop level to pre-surge levels by mid-July 2008. A modest proposal, eh?I also noted a few points that General Petraeus did not address (though many in the...