Today, TWN is heading to New York after a successful planning retreat in Pittsburgh.
Planning to hear George Soros this evening speak about his new book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror at a meeting hosted by Eric Alterman and The Century Foundation.
I have read the book and strongly recommend it. This is really a sequel to Soros’s last book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: The Costs of Bush’s War in Iraq, which I found prescient. Soros is contemplating what happens with his great projects once he departs this world and provides a human and revealing assessment of what his vision and resources have helped accomplish, particularly in Eastern Europe.
But the most important take-away from the book is that American democracy is in serious trouble. While the terminology I prefer to use is that George Bush and a long list of winners have benefited from taking America into a “high-fear” environment, Soros writes that the “Global War on Terror” is a false, cynically contrived metaphor that Bush and his team have used to exploit the fear and insecurity of Americans to justify anything they want to do — without serious challenge or oversight.
Soros also says that two arenas of work that he and his foundation have not invested in but which matter significantly to the future of mankind are the world’s energy challenges and how these balance with environmental pressures, particularly climate change — and the other is nuclear non-proliferation. Soros thinks that the business of non-proliferation is overcrowded with well-meaning but largely ineffective practitioners who have to rethink their approach as the non-proliferation regime is failing dramatically.
Should be an interesting dinner discussion tonight — and thanks to Eric Alterman and Richard Leone of The Century Foundation in advance for including me.
Tomorrow I am back to Washington, and Thursday evening I have the privilege of chairing a small dinner salon discussion of the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program with CSIS Trustree and former National Security Advisor to the President Zbigniew Brzezinski who will be addressing American Stakes in the Middle East.
I will be reporting about the content of the Brzezinski discussion on Friday.
More later.
— Steve Clemons
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