Mostrando resultados por Editor "Foreign Affairs" en Todas las categorías

The mood of much of the world is grim these days. Turmoil in the Middle East, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees; random terrorist attacks across the globe; geopolitical tensions in eastern Europe and Asia; the end of the commodity supercycle; slowing growth in China; and economic stagnation in many countries - all have combined to feed a deep pessimism about the present and, worse, the future.

The Millennium Development Goals are due to expire at the end of 2015, and debate has turned to what should come next, with hundreds of new targets already proposed. Governments need to focus carefully and decide which goals offer the greatest returns on investment.

How to marginalize the Islamic State online.

How should politicians and policymakers respond to economic inequality? A new collection of essays offers some answers, but much work still needs to be done to turn academic ideas into practical proposals.

Washington doesn’t have the luxury of simply avoiding insurgencies, so it needs to figure out how to fight them better. Drawn from more than a decade of war, here are 10 lessons for doing so.

A century on, discussions about the Ottoman massacre of Armenians are still dominated by questions surrounding the use of one fraught and divisive word: "Genocide". Washington should use the term, but also recognize its many limitations.

In the U.S. military, at least, the “pivot” to Asia has begun. By 2020, the navy and the air force plan to base 60 percent of their forces in the Asia-Pacific region. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is investing a growing share of its shrinking resources in new long-range bombers and nuclear-powered submarines designed to operate in high-threat environments.

On March 30, 2008, several hundred people gathered at the waterfront in San Francisco. They had come to witness the unveiling of a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: 2,800 Americans who joined some 35,000 other volunteers from more than 50 countries to defend the Spanish Republic against fascist forces during Spain’s civil war. The conflict, which raged from 1936 until 1939, led to the deaths of around half a million people, including at least 750 Americans.

During the early Cold War, the Dulles and Bundy brothers played critical roles in shaping U.S. foreign policy. New biographies make clear that the all four men had some common ideological blindspots. But how much of their worldview and behavior can be attributed to their WASP establishment backgrounds is an open question.

Should the United States commit its unrivaled power to spreading democracy and cementing Washington’s leadership of the liberal international order? Or would U.S. interests be better served by less American intervention in world affairs—and, in particular, by less exertion of U.S. military force? Two recent books seek to persuade Americans to reconsider the advantages of more actively exercising U.S. power and military force.

It is a measure of how much the United States’ security has improved since the more dangerous moments of the Cold War that the most troublesome issues in the military field today concern not weapons of mass destruction but targeted killing. The power that comes with access to the nuclear codes, of course, remains foremost when considering a presidential candidate’s fitness for office. Yet no American leader has authorized the use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

The promises of science fiction are quickly becoming workaday realities. Cars and trucks are starting to drive themselves in normal traffic. Machines have begun to understand our speech, figure out what we want, and satisfy our requests. They have learned to write clean prose, generate novel scientific hypotheses (that are supported by later research), compose evocative music, and beat us, quite literally, at our own games: chess, poker, and even go.

The Tea Party and its European cousins have emerged from the enduring inability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens' needs. Today’s populist movements won’t subside until the legitimate grievances driving them have been addressed.

Hamas is becoming increasingly unpopular in Gaza. And the group itself is divided, with its moderate Politburo increasingly overshadowed by a hard-line military wing.

Xi Jinping is now set to lead China for the next fifteen years or more.

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.

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. This means that the real winners of the future will be neither the providers of cheap labor nor the owners of ordinary capital, but rather those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

In profiling two leading figures in the German resistance, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern have revealed an important truth about the anti-Nazi underground: although those who opposed Hitler often had motives unrelated to anti-Semitism, the most influential resisters were driven primarily by a shared horror at the mass murder of Jews.

Chinese policymakers have been making a push to internationalize the renminbi but, if they want it to displace the dollar, they will have to move much faster on a set of broad economic and regulatory reforms and take a less centralized approach to economic policymaking.

Although today’s right-wing populists share some similarities with the interwar fascists, the differences are more significant. And more important, what today’s comparisons often fail to explain is how noxious politicians and parties grow into the type of revolutionary movements capable of fundamentally threatening democracy, as interwar fascism did.