15 Items

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Book Chapter - Routledge

Sino-Russian Relations: Same Bed, Different Dreams?

    Editors:
  • Donette Murray
  • David Brown
| Nov. 09, 2017

Fu Ying, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, contends that the “Chinese-Russian relationship is a stable strategic partnership and by no means a marriage of convenience: it is complex, sturdy, and deeply rooted.” This chapter from Power Relations in the Twenty-First Century Mapping a Multipolar World?, a volume of Contemporary Security Studies, attempts to capture the changing dynamics of Russian-Chinese relations, focusing on how the two countries affect each other’s national interests—and how those interactions, in turn, will shape their relationship in decades to come and the prospects for a more multipolar, post-American world.

In this Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 file photo, President Donald Trump holds up a signed Presidential Memorandum in the Oval Office in Washington. Just two days after banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations, U.S. President Donald Trump invited the Saudi monarch, whose kingdom includes Islam’s holiest sites, to fly to Washington. It points to the delicate balancing act Trump faces as he tries to deliver on campaign promises to exterminate “radical Islamic terrorism” without endangering political and

AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

Analysis & Opinions - The New Republic

Trump’s Foreign Policy Chaos

| Jan. 23, 2017

There is more to today’s prevailing gloom than concern about routine acts of terror. There is also a sense of strategic disorientation: After nearly three quarters of a century, the foundations of the liberal world order are giving way. In Europe, tepid growth, demographic decline, Russian revanchism and resurgent populism are testing the durability of Western cohesion.

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneels in front of a memorial at the site of the former Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland (7 December 1970).

AP Photo

Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

On Political Forgiveness: Some Preliminary Reflections

| June 2016

This policy brief examines political forgiveness, when countries or groups are able to reconcile or set aside historic enmities.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman makes the case that insights from frameworks of personal forgiveness can help nations seize the moment when their interests align and, accordingly, move to achieve political forgiveness. First, the process of forgiveness requires a sense of justice—victims must feel that perpetrators have been held accountable and will no longer be able to hurt them. It must also be a deep, extended undertaking: when perpetrators offer only superficial acknowledgments of the victims’ pain and attempt to move on quickly, victims perceive those efforts as perfunctory, even disingenuous.

Additionally, countries must reestablish genuine, ongoing contact to overcome narratives of “the other” that inhibit forgiveness. They should not assume, however, that political forgiveness will proceed as a linear, three-part process in which the perpetrator issues an apology, the victim accepts the apology, and the two subsequently cultivate their ties on the basis of aligned national interests.

The world is getting better. Why don’t we believe it?

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Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

The world is getting better. Why don’t we believe it?

| January 26, 2016

It would seem entirely reasonable to conclude that the world has taken several turns for the worse since President George H.W. Bush delivered his famous “new world order” address. The United Nations estimates that more than 250,000 people have perished in Syria’s civil war, and another million or so have been injured. With vast swathes of the Middle East collapsing, the Islamic State continues to wreak havoc, increasingly inspiring and coordinating attacks outside the region.

Analysis & Opinions - The New York Times

What Would Lee Kuan Yew Do?

| March 23, 2015

WASHINGTON — With China accelerating its military modernization, Russia continuing its slow-drip incursion into Ukraine, and an expanding section of the Middle East devolving into chaos, it has once again become fashionable to argue that the United States is in decline. Strangely, Americans are often far quicker to accept this diagnosis than their counterparts abroad.

Analysis & Opinions - The American Interest

What is America’s role in the World?

| Thursday October 30, 2014

Rarely,” the New York Times observed this July, “has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate foreign policy crises all at once.” Some of these crises, like the ascent of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), are bloody and fast-moving. Others, like the civil war in Syria, are grisly, protracted, and slow-moving. Others are grinding along sufficiently slowly that they feel less like crises than enduring foreign-policy challenges: consider the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program, which Graham Allison likens to “a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” and China’s quiet but purposeful campaign to settle its maritime disputes, which will likely play out over several decades.

Analysis & Opinions - The Diplomat

Letter to Obama’s Successor: Governing An America That’s Number 2

| Aug. 16, 2013

Dear Mr./Ms. President:

Each of your predecessors has had to confront crises, at home and abroad, and, especially in the last third of our nation’s history, each has had to respond to events and trends abroad that could affect vital interests.  You will doubtless have to do so as well.

Analysis & Opinions

Some Thoughts on the Ethics of China's Rise

| Aug. 14, 2013

Any commentary with a title such as this one should begin with a disclaimer: distilling a country of 1.34 billion people down to a construct called "China" is presumptuous, verging on preposterous. Who best represents "the views of China?" Its government? Its dissidents? The individuals who may be critical of government policies, but choose to go about their daily business rather than investing the time and energy to express their criticisms?