How close the U.S. and USSR came to mutually assured destruction (a term not then in vogue) during the Cuban missile crisis seems, on the crisis’s half-century anniversary, like it ought to be settled history. But as new and new-ish scholarship shows, the standard accounts, while not wildly inaccurate, could use some refining. The conventional version is that President Kennedy, after learning that the Soviet bloc had placed nuclear weapons on their ally Cuba’s soil, risked setting off nuclear war when he imposed a naval blockade on Cuba even as Soviet naval units were en route to the ... Read More
Clearer Vision on the ‘Eyeball-to-Eyeball’ Cuban Missile Crisis
October 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Burma’s Redemption More Domestic Than Imported
May 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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
Engaging Iran Through Vaccine Diplomacy
November 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
To counter Iran’s emerging nuclear threat, we might look back to a little-known but highly effective Cold War collaboration between the U.S. and Soviet Union that defused international tensions and led to one of the world’s greatest humanitarian discoveries. Today, we are on the verge of achieving the global eradication of polio. Most of this success can be attributed to the development of a safe and effective live oral polio vaccine, a discovery that first began during the 1950s in the Cincinnati laboratory of Dr. Albert Sabin. Few are aware, however, that Sabin’s initial discovery ... Read More
The U.N.’s Death Squad Watchdog
June 3, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
In a troubled African nation one morning not long ago, Philip Alston was driven in a convoy of three white SUVs, with armed escorts front and rear, to a town south of the capital. Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, was going to meet with eyewitnesses to, and victims of, a violent crackdown by local police on political opponents of the government. An Australian native who now lives in New York, Alston has spent more than three decades working in human rights and international law. He was in the country (which Alston asked not be ... Read More
Iran: From Axis to Ally?
June 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Tehran-born Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has testified several times in recent years before various U.S. Senate committees, emerging as one of the most vocal proponents of diplomatic engagement with Iran. Released on the eve of Iran's 10th presidential election, his Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs extends and elaborates on this theme, breaking dramatically with the Bush administration's infamous characterization of the regime in Tehran as part of an "axis of evil." Rather, Takeyh provides ... Read More
Americans Log Into Hermit Kingdom
May 18, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Journalists accompanying the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to Pyongyang in February 2007 had a surprise when they were given a tour of the library at North Korea's MIT, the Kim Chaek University of Technology: Computers there were hooked up to the Internet. Some quickly logged on to send greetings from the sequestered country — formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea but famously dubbed the Hermit Kingdom — from updated Facebook pages. As one of the world's least plugged-in countries, the connection proved be something of a Potemkin moment, but not nearly as much ... Read More
Science Diplomacy: Trading Frock Coats for Lab Coats
February 9, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Vaughan Turekian is pushing an unusual suggestion for how to engage Iran, a country America has had no formal relations with since 1980. His idea is suddenly one of many on the topic, as foreign policy wonks, historians and politicians debate the merits of starting a new dialogue with some of America's longest-running antagonists. Should we send a low-level diplomat, the new secretary of state or the president himself? Turekian's suggestion — one that applies equally to isolated locations throughout the world — is this: Send a scientist. Deep-rooted suspicion (and a slew of fictional ... Read More
The Man Who Bridges Troubled Waters
December 29, 2008 • By • 2 Comments
In 1991, as Aaron Wolf was finishing his doctoral dissertation, the Madrid Middle East peace process was just getting under way. The two sides decided to tackle five sets of regional issues, including the equitable division of water resources. As a budding expert on the subject — his research focused on the Jordan River and its dual role as "a flashpoint and a vehicle for dialogue" — Wolf agreed to advise the U.S. team designing the talks. Fifteen years later, one remnant of that failed attempt at Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking remains: the water negotiations. "They still go on," Wolf ... Read More
