Interview with Martin Wolf on What We Should Expect from G-20 but Won’t Get

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Barack Obama and G-20 leaders will probably emerge from the sessions that start today with (1) commitments on international financial regulatory reform, (2) non-binding commitments to various (mostly modest) stimulus strategies within their own economies, (3) a commitment to significantly enhance the resources of the International Monetary Fund and (4) a joint commitment to “resist…

C-Span Washington Journal Wednesday

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Greetings to TWN readers. I apologize for being a bit AWOL in last few days as I’ve been absorbing a flood of information on President Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and very involved in some of the back end efforts trying to affect the agenda of the G-20 Summit in London.

Guest Post by Michael Cohen: The Trouble with Counter-Insurgency

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(Photo Credit: Army.mil’s photosream) Michael Cohen co-directs the New America Foundation/Privatization of Foreign Policy Initiative. As I’ve written before, I’m not much of a fan of counter-insurgency doctrine and two events over the past several days lend compelling evidence as to why. Quite simply, it’s the politics, stupid.

Guest Post by Katherine Tiedemann: Leaving Waziristan

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Katherine Tiedemann is a program associate at the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program. President Obama has shown his willingness to continue President Bush’s method for combating militancy on the Pakistani side of the Afghan/Pakistan border, ordering CIA-piloted QM-1 Predator drones to strike militant targets in Pakistan approximately once a week since he took office.

US-Cuba Policy Change is Coming. . .

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Vice President Joe Biden said this week that President Obama had no intention of ending the embargo of Cuba when he attends the Summit of the Americas in mid-April, but as Senator Richard Lugar and his senior staff member, Carl Meacham, outlined in a Senate Foreign Relations Commitee Print on US-Cuba relations, there is a…

The Manatee and the Robin

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This manatee floated up to the surface in one of the canals in Ft. Lauderdale when I was there a week ago. It was a magnificent creature and stayed with us quite a while — sort of posing. Maybe since Spring is upon us, I’ve been more tuned into nature than normal.