検索キーワード： ナレーター "Kevin Stillwell" すべてのカテゴリー

The legal and diplomatic challenges Trump would face in re-instituting Iran sanctions make it hard to see how he could rebuild effective international economic pressure on Iran. 

Anti-solutionism as a strategy.

On June 30, a week after the British public voted to leave the EU, Theresa May gave a speech launching her candidacy for prime minister in which she declared, "Brexit means Brexit." Her message was straightforward: even though she herself had supported remaining in the EU, she would not hesitate to implement the will of the voters. Yet months after assuming office, May has yet to answer crucial questions about what a British exit, or Brexit, would mean for trade, immigration, and financial services.

The coming revolution in genetic engineering will be exciting to some, frightening to others, and challenging for all. If not adequately addressed, it will also likely lead to major conflict both within societies and globally.

Turkey, where there has been a rise in Islamic religiosity, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, founder of the pro-Islamist Development and Justice Party (AKP), is converting some public schools into seminaries called imam–hatips (or traditional training schools for Sunni Muslim clergy) in an effort to raise a generation of “religious youth.”

The U.S. electrical grid has hardly changed since the War of Currents, the 1880s fight that saw George Westinghouse’s alternating current triumph over Thomas Edison’s direct current as the preferred method for generating and transmitting electricity. It remains a network of long-distance transmission and distribution lines designed to move electricity in one direction: from giant, lumbering fossil fuel plants to faraway households and businesses. This system has endured because it has proved safe, reliable, effective, and affordable.

A new trove of documents that were among those seized in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, were presented recently during the trial of Abid Naseer at the Brooklyn federal district court.

When Hillary Clinton’s career as a lawyer first drew media attention during the 1992 presidential campaign of her husband, Bill Clinton, she mused that she could have skipped law practice to stay at home and bake cookies. The comment led to a now-famous cookie bake-off between Clinton and Barbara Bush, which the upstart Arkansas governor’s wife handily won.

The technology revolution has transformed one industry after another, from retail to manufacturing to transportation. Its most far-reaching effects, however, may be playing out in the unlikeliest of places: the traditional industries of oil, gas, and electricity.

Four months into his presidency, at a summit in Prague, Barack Obama pledged to take “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” Yet nearly eight years later, he presides over a program to modernize the entire US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $35 billion a year through the next decade and beyond. To those who accuse him of hypocrisy, Obama has said that he always regarded a nuclear-free world as a long-term goal, unlikely to be met in his lifetime, much less his time in office.

The start-and-stop nature of Trump's border policies has played a role in attracting migrants from as far away as Central Africa to the U.S.-Mexican border.  

Russian President Vladimir Putin used to seem invincible. Today, he and his regime look enervated, confused, and desperate. Increasingly, both Russian and Western commentators suggest that Russia may be on the verge of deep instability, possibly even collapse.

Over the past half century, as other political systems have crumbled, the liberal international order has risen to repeated challenges. Yet so long as the economies of its leading members remain fragile and their political institutions divided, the order that they have championed is unlikely to regain the political momentum that helped democracy spread across the globe.

After 9/11, many within the U.S. national security establishment worried that, following decades of preparation for confronting conventional enemies, Washington was unready for the challenge posed by an unconventional adversary such as al Qaeda. So over the next decade, the United States built an elaborate bureaucratic structure to fight the jihadist organization, adapting its military and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies to the tasks of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

Soon after Benjamin Netanyahu began his second term as Israel’s prime minister in March 2009, he ordered the country’s military to develop a plan for a unilateral military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The air force and the intelligence branch went to work immediately; according to Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu’s predecessor, the preparations alone would ultimately cost the country nearly $3 billion.

For nearly four centuries, since the Peace of Westphalia, the concept of sovereignty has occupied the core of what international order there has been. But an approach to international order premised solely on respect for sovereignty is no longer sufficient. Today’s circumstances call for an updated operating system—call it World Order 2.0—that includes not only the rights of sovereign states but also those states’ obligations to others.

The United States has the best military in the world today, by far. US forces have few, if any, weaknesses, and in many areas - from naval warfare to precision-strike capabilities, to airpower, to intelligence and reconnaissance, to special operations - they play in a totally different league from the militaries of other countries. Nor is this situation likely to change anytime soon, as US defense spending is almost three times as large as that of the United States’ closest competitor, China.

Humanity has made enormous progress in recent decades. To keep it going, policymakers need to understand and support the institutions and policies that created it in the first place.

Last month, India unveiled its latest federal budget. To the surprise of many, it includes a strong emphasis on farming, with plans to double the incomes of Indian farmers within the next six years, to release $16 billion from the budget for rural development projects that include farmers’ welfare initiatives, and to allocate some $2.5 billion to speeding up delayed irrigation projects.

The two economic developments that have garnered the most attention in recent years are the concentration of massive wealth in the richest one percent of the world’s population and the tremendous, growth-driven decline in extreme poverty in the developing world, especially in China. But just as important has been the emergence of large middle classes in developing countries around the planet.