Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

A debate over Egyptian foreign policy and the Muslim Brotherhood.

How accurate is this picture, and to what extent were the Karzais responsible for the deterioration in U.S.-Afghan ties? That question is at the heart of Joshua Partlow's excellent A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. As in any divorce, there are two sides to the story.

Manufacturing in the United States will create millions of jobs over the next decade, but the U.S. work force is unprepared to fill them. To educate its young people for these “middle-skill” jobs, the United States should look to Germany, where a system of vocational education ensures students are trained in the skills they need.

A father’s letters to his son explore some of the questions the son will face growing up, along with a range of possible answers. A generation of Muslims should realize that they have the right—and the obligation—to think about and decide what is right and what is wrong, what is Islamic and what is peripheral to the faith.

After serving five terms in the US Senate - including four years heading the Foreign Relations Committee and surviving one unsuccessful run for president, John Kerry became President Barack Obama’s secretary of state in February 2013. Since then, Kerry, a deco-rated Vietnam veteran, has been in near-constant motion, logging more miles than any of his predecessors (1,281,744 at last count).

It has been more than seven years since US President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13491, banning the US government’s use of torture. Obama’s directive was a powerful rebuke to the Bush administration, which had, in the years after the 9/11 attacks, authorized the CIA and the US military to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” in questioning suspected terrorists.

As the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the right-wing French political party the National Front, Marine Le Pen grew up in politics, starting to campaign with her father at 13. Trained as a lawyer, she won her first election in 1998, as a regional councilor, and in 2011, she succeeded her father as party leader. She soon distanced herself from his more extreme positions, and eventually - after he reiterated his claim that the Holocaust was a "detail" of history - she expelled him from its ranks.

The next US president will inherit a security environment in which the United States con-fronts mounting threats with increasingly constrained resources, diminished stature, and growing uncertainty both at home and abroad over its willingness to protect its friends and its interests. Revisionist powers in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf - three regions long considered by both Democratic and Republican administrations to be vital to US national security.

Over the past two decades, Germany’s global role has undergone a remarkable transformation. Following its peaceful reunification in 1990, Germany was on track to become an economic giant that had little in the way of foreign policy. Today, however, the country is a major European power that attracts praise and criticism in equal measure. This holds true both for Germany’s response to the recent surge of refugees - it welcomed more than one million people last year - and for its handling of the euro crisis.

In May 2013, when I became commander of US European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, I found US and NATO forces well suited for their requirements at the time but ill prepared for the challenges that lay ahead. The United States’ military presence in Europe, which had shrunk significantly since the 1990s, was not oriented toward a specific threat. NATO, for its part, was mostly involved in operations out-side the continent, primarily in Afghanistan.

When Barack Obama joined other global leaders at the G-20 summit in Turkey, the United States was in the final stages of a multiyear effort to secure the approval of a set of important reforms to the International Monetary Fund. The reforms were designed to double the organization’s core financial resources to combat financial crises and to modernize its governance by increasing the voting shares of emerging-market economies while maintaining a decisive US voice.

Transparency has long been a rare commodity in international affairs. But today, the forces of technology are ushering in a new age of openness that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Governments, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can now harness a flood of open-source information, drawn from commercial surveillance satellites, drones, smartphones, and computers, to reveal hidden activities in contested areas - from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea.

The biggest revelation offered by Ben Bernanke’s memoir of his time as chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve is just how much the public, the media, and especially elected officials have misunderstood the real lessons of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession - events that defined Bernanke’s tenure, which began in 2006 and ended in 2014.

What determines whether attempts at democratic transitions will be successful? Past experience offers some insights. We conducted extended interviews with 12 former presidents and one former prime minister who played vital roles in the successful democratic transitions of Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, and Spain. Some were leaders in authoritarian regimes who nevertheless helped steer their countries toward effective democracy.

Anti-solutionism as a strategy.

A conversation with Ashton Carter.

The end of sanctions and the Iranian economy.

The case for deterrence.

In Russia, military service is mandatory for men aged 18 to 27. But according to a recent European Parliamentary Research Service report, each year, half of all would-be conscripts - 75,000 out of an annual intake of around 150,000 young men - are thought to be dodging the draft. And now the conflicts in Ukraine in Syria are expected to push those numbers even higher.

In the early 1900s, the American journalist Alfred Henry Lewis famously wrote that there are only nine meals between men and revolution. As the water resources available for agricultural production decline precipitously across the Middle East, we ignore Lewis’ observation at our peril.