For decades, various Chinese officials and outsiders have reassured the world that the country’s Communist Party leadership eventually planned to open up its one-party political system. The regime would undertake major political reforms and liberalization, it was said, to accompany the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s. It was merely a question of choosing the right time. Writing in Foreign Affairs two years ago, John L.
When President Obama launched a massive humanitarian-aid response to Haiti's earthquake last month, not everyone took his magnanimity at face value. Hugo Chavez, for example, accused him of "occupying Haiti undercover" and then upped the ante by saying the earthquake had been caused by an American "tectonic weapon." A minister from France, Haiti's former colonial ruler, complained that the U.S. response should be "about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti."
On May 20, 2006, Ibrahim Gambari, the gregarious UN under-secretary general for political affairs, met with leaders of Burma’s military junta and their most famous political prisoner, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. It was Gambari’s first trip to Burma, and the first time in two years that the country’s secretive rulers had granted a UN official such high-level access. Gambari’s optimism was palpable: “They want to open up another chapter of relationship with the international community,” the seasoned Nigerian diplomat said in a press conference on May 24. But three days later, only a week after meeting with Gambari, the junta extended Suu Kyi’s house arrest by a year. Suddenly, Gambari’s optimism was his humiliation. “People thought he had fallen for their line,” says Mark Farmaner, director of Campaign for Burma UK. “He was completely suckered.”
President Obama gave a pretty good speech when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe it was a little too eloquent. I don’t much like soaring rhetoric; I know there are times to soar, but Obama does it, or tries to do it, every time. Plain speech is also useful, and there was some plain speech in Norway—particularly the reiterated insistence, directed, I think, to our European friends, that sometimes making war is the only way to a just peace.
From the hills outside Mandalay, Burma’s second city, the vista resembles a postcard of Asian serenity. Monks climb stone steps to a hillside shrine, where local men and women leave offerings of flowers and fruit. But the placid scene conceals one of the most repressive states in the world--a state that the Obama administration has decided may be more worthy of American friendship than American threats.
For more than four decades, Burma’s junta has persecuted its population. In conflict-torn eastern Burma, the army reportedly employs state-sanctioned rape of women and girls, conscription of local children, and the burning of villages. Nearly one million Burmese have fled to neighboring countries, while those who stay are sometimes press-ganged into forced labor, during which, numerous reports reveal, they may be beaten or even killed. Dissent, of course, is virtually unthinkable. According to the documentary film Burma VJ, which chronicles the monk-led 2007 Saffron Revolution, troops raided monasteries after the protests, beating monks and tossing their dead bodies into creeks. The junta, meanwhile, has run the economy into the ground, while the regime’s senior leaders live in opulence.
A report released at the Copenhagen summit today calls on wealthy countries to help developing nations adapt to climate change before it's too late. The Climate Risk Index 2010, published by the international climate and development group Germanwatch, "analysed the impacts of weather-related loss events—mainly storms, floods and heatwaves—for all countries currently negotiating in Copenhagen," according to the press release. And the findings are alarming:
As the world tries to cut its carbon emissions in the next few decades, natural gas will become increasingly crucial as a stopgap fuel, since it produces less CO2 pollution than coal or oil. At least, that's what the EIA thinks will happen. And the geopolitical implications of this trend are interesting.
I spent some time yesterday and today trying to figure out Foreign Policy magazine's ranking of failed states. Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Sudan got first, second, and third place--no surprises there. But what initially piqued my interest was the high ranking given to Kenya, a country where I just spent two weeks (on a trip sponsored by the International Reporting Project, based at Johns Hopkins).
The generals are deaf. As everyone now knows, the regime was warned by weather forecasters in India two days before the cyclone arrived--five days before by forecasters in Thailand--and it refused to listen.
In this TNR debate, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation and New Republic deputy editor Richard Just discuss the appropriate response to the Beijing Olympics. In light of China's manifold human rights problems, how should fans, Olympic athletes, presidential candidates, and the U.S. government itself respond to the games? Click here for part one of the exchange.
From: Richard Just
To: Steven Clemons
George Stephanopoulos turned up at the Supreme Court last week, sitting next to Joel Klein, the deputy White House counsel. Their joint appearance seemed to illustrate the administration's anxiety about the case, Adarand v. Pena, in which the Court is being asked to strike down racial preferences in the construction industry that have been endorsed by every president since Nixon. But Klein assured me afterward that Stephanopoulos, who had never seen a Supreme Court argument before, had come along purely out of curiosity. He picked a good day.
This article was originally printed on October 1, 1962
It has become a settled conviction, at least among American democratic idealists, that the contest which engulfs the political life of the whole world is between Communism and democracy.
This article was originally printed on October 1, 1962
It has become a settled conviction, at least among American democratic idealists, that the contest which engulfs the political life of the whole world is between Communism and democracy.
