Today’s diplomatic hardball over U.S. sanctions in Burma would be a great Graham Greene novel, were there any evidence the program played a central role in the dictatorship’s unraveling. Burma analyst Andrew Selth at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia and investigators at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, among others, argue that foreign pressure isn’t the stick that beat reform into Burma. It’s the carrot, and not much of one. The basic argument is pretty simple and goes like this: Burma’s longtime strongman, Than Shwe, got old and passed power ... Read More
Did Shoddy Editing Enable American Torture?
April 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
A new analysis in the California Law Review, the student-run publication of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, argues that flaws in the student editing system in that same journal paved the way for John Yoo to publish a career-launching article in 1996. The article set forth a dubious legal basis for practices like waterboarding, which Yoo later applied to U.S. policy as the Bush administration official chiefly responsible for the infamous “torture memos.” A critical look at the article by any mainstream historian, though, would have thrown cold water on Yoo’s ... Read More
Why Obama Is Looking West
April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
With little fanfare and far less media awareness than one might expect, last fall the Obama administration initiated a series of defense-policy moves that amount to the most significant transformation of America’s military position in the world since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. This new defense posture may even rework the post–World War II order itself. After all, if we are witnessing the dwindling in importance of Europe, a withdrawal from insoluble Middle East and South Asian crises, the inexorable pull of a growing China, and America turning to face the Pacific ... Read More
China’s Accidental Spies
April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The jet fighter suddenly appears directly overhead, twin engines roaring, landing gear dangling like claws, diamond-shaped wings tracing an impressive black silhouette against the grayish sky. The airplane, displaying the red-star insignia of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, whips past and disappears beyond the opposite horizon. In its wake, there is only the gray sky — and the excited chatter of a cameraman and the other airplane aficionados huddled around him. “The wind was strong!” someone says in the local Sichuan dialect, referring to the blast from the fighter’s ... Read More
Should the U.S. Govern Lagos? Dhaka? Kinshasa?
April 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
From 1950 to 2015, as projected by the United Nations, the population of Lagos will rise from 1 million to 25 million; Dhaka, from 400,000 to 22.8 million; and Kinshasa, from 200,000 to 10.5 million. These are among the places the authors of the new book The Real Population Bomb describe as “Category 5 Megacities.” In a riff on Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 classic, Peter Liotta and James Fiskel argue that exponential urban growth is a danger to human survival. The problem, however, is not simple overpopulation but massive suffering and chaos in places where corruption and poverty ... Read More