Category: General

There is a great meeting going on right now in Washington sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, the Aspen Institute and the Newseum. The meeting is called “First Draft of History.

This New York Times piece makes the economic case on why the 2016 Olympics fit Brazil’s needs and bid more than Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo. But more broadly and thinking ahead, Brazil is a key component of the BRICs group — Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy This is very inside DC baseball stuff on Senator Jim DeMint’s plans to visit Honduras which were announced via twitter, then stopped by Senator John Kerry, and then put back on track by Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

Tonight, some time between 9 and 10 pm EST (and then again between 11 pm and midnight) during the Rachel Maddow Show — not sure of time just yet — I’ll be chatting with Rachel about America’s foreign policy plate. We may be on McChrystal, Petraeus & Afghanistan.

A movie on the Honduras coup may not be the big draw that the Tom Hanks film, Charlie Wilson’s War, was — but one has to wonder whether we are seeing a remake in which a lone Member of Congress, this time a US Senator from South Carolina, drags the country into the internal affairs…

Given the tumultuousness in many parts of America’s foreign policy portfolio, it’s easy to nitpick and criticize (which I do frequently), but I have to tip my hat to President Obama’s measured and positive comments today following the conclusion of what are officially called the P5+1 Negotiations with Iran.

I am presently a guest of David Bradley, Walter Isaacson and Shelby Coffey at the Atlantic Monthly/Aspen Institute/Newseum sponsored mega-wonk meeting titled “First Draft of History.” It’s an excellent conference, but I’m losing it listening to Republican Majority Leader Whip Eric Cantor essentially argue that there is zero value engaging Iran.

Oliver Lough is a research intern at the New America Foundation. China’s 60th birthday was celebrated in elaborate and wonderfully old-fashioned style by the thousands of carefully choreographed performers (and pieces of military hardware) that congregated in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square this morning.

David Shorr is a program officer at the Stanley Foundation and co-editor of Powers and Principles: International Leadership In A Shrinking World.

As my colleague Oliver Lough wrote on this blog yesterday, climate change is one of the foreign policy issues on which Europe has led the way for some time now. Try as they might, it has been difficult for Europeans to get their American friends to follow suit.