Economics & Global Affairs

While veteran diplomat Nick Burns calls the president's order an 'overreach,' Republican consultant Scott Jennings says he's making strides internationally.

The North American market is a significant driver of U.S. economic activity and competitiveness. Mexico and Canada are the United States’ two biggest export markets, making up over a third of overall U.S. exports valued at more than $580 billion. Imports from both countries contain far higher proportions of American content than goods that are imported from Asia or Europe.

Nonetheless, and even recognizing the new era of North American trade created by the North American Free Trade Agreement, there are still significant logistical constraints to commercial flows within North America, with the result that the United States, Mexico, and Canada are effectively leaving money on the table in terms of competitiveness and job growth. And many of these constraints are tied to the efficiency of the countries’ ports of entry.

In the global revulsion at the recent terror attacks in four Muslim countries, the United States and its allies have a new opportunity to build a unified command against the Islamic State and other extremists. FDP Senior Fellow David Ignatius examines the diplomatic relationships needed to create an effective counterterrorism strategy.

"What do we learn when we actually listen to Arab citizens? Zogby Research Services, headed by the experienced Arab-American political activist James Zogby, just surveyed over 7,400 adults in six Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), Turkey, and Iran, for an annual gathering hosted by the United Arab Emirates government..."

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.

We don’t have a strategy yet.” With those words, President Obama seems to have encapsulated everything that his critics have been alleging for months: that he’s improvising, halting and altogether slow to react to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, the brutal terrorist group that has seized much of Iraq and Syria and on Tuesday claimed to have beheaded a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff. And certainly, the president’s detractors have pounced on his poorly chosen word

"Having a professional military means that the United States can go to war while the vast majority of citizens are not directly affected. Therefore it falls upon the president, more than any other individual, to make sure the nation goes to war only if and when absolutely necessary."

BEIRUT -- This week’s sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States sees the top American military and diplomatic officials in Iraq speaking to the US Congress about American strategy in Iraq. The juxtaposition is noteworthy: Six years ago, a small band of Al-Qaeda militants attacked the United States and killed some 3000 people. Today, an army of over 160,000 American troops wages a war in Iraq that has seen tens of thousands of people killed since 2003. Neither policy makes much sense to anyone in the world, other than to those fanatics on both sides who decided to pursue these actions.

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