This is what state failure looks like. Zimbabwe is in everyone’s backyard. In an increasingly interconnected world, cooperating to help Zimbabwe pull itself together is in everyone’s interest. Everyone ought to read the International Crisis Group’s important report.
Last week I published an article in Foreign Policy.com titled “Why We’d Miss Musharraf” that has generated pushback from Benazir Bhutto’s political party and the PR firm she hired, none other than Mark Penn’s Burson-Marsteller.
(Yasuo Fukuda is on the right) Mindy Kotler is director of Asia Policy Point, a Washington research center that provides objective information on East Asia to the policy community. To be sure, Japan only marginally matters right now.
We take it for granted that Presidential candidates say dumb things during campaigns. Sure. That’s a given. Mitt Romney’s taking it a step farther with a letter to the United Nations he released today.
Unilateralists are getting ready to squirm. The date for the first hearing on the Law of the Sea convention has been set for September 27, when government witnesses will testify. In October, treaty opponents and business representatives (all supporters) will testify in a second hearing.
If you’re in the Southwest United States in the next few days and have some spare time, you’re in for a treat. My colleagues Raj Purohit and Tom Moran are on tour with Michael Otterman. The three are discussing Otterman’s important book, American Torture.
General Wesley Clark, who was the first among potential presidential candidates, to call for direct nation-to-nation talks between Iran and the United States, has just endorsed Hillary Clinton — who came later to that view on Iran than he did.
I’m going to be over at Al Jazeera tonight listening to and then offering reactions on Bush’s speech on Iraq. Bush is going to restate his intention to draw down US force levels in Iraq by 30,000 troops, to pre-surge levels.
My New America Foundation colleague Michael Lind and author of The American Way of Strategy has just penned a thoughtful op-ed that gets right at the nugget of what Senator Lugar was pushing in his opening statement at the Crocker/Petraeus Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings.
The political demise and fall of Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the best news from Japan I have seen in some time.
