THE LIMITS OF CHINESE-RUSSIAN PARTNERSHIP. Rajan Menon, Survival, April-May 2009, pp. 99-130. "Since 1996, Russia and China have been united in what both call a 'strategic partnership'. But the current stage of their relationship will more than likely give way to another that could surprise us, as previous ones have. The direction of such shifts has generally defied expectations. While Beijing values its strategic partnership with Russia, particularly as a means for obtaining arms and energy, it has no illusions that Russia and China can create an effective counterweight to the United States. It still sees the United States as the world's premier power, even as it finds some of Washington's actions objectionable. The United States should expect the Sino-Russian strategic partnership to endure and even to expand, but should not equate it with an alliance and react with panic. Stability and peace between Russia and China are in America's interest; they make the world in general and East Asia in particular safer places." READ MORE

AFRICA: THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA COURT THE CONTINENT. David H Shinn. Journal of International Affairs, Spring 2009, pp. 37-54. "The US and China are the two most important bilateral, external actors in Africa today. While the US wields more influence in most of Africa's fifty-three countries, China has surpassed it in a number of states and is challenging it in others. Both countries look to Africa as an increasingly significant source of raw materials, especially oil. The recent economic downturn poses new challenges for the interaction of both the US and China with African countries. While all three parties will suffer to some extent, China is better situated over the short-term to weather the storm. The new Obama administration will inevitably make some changes in the US approach toward Africa and may reassess the way the US interacts with China on the continent. The US is as interested as China in obtaining political and economic support of African countries in international forums." READ MORE

MANCHURIAN PARADOX. Stephen S Roach, The National Interest, May/Junr 2009, pp. 59-66. "The Chinese word for crisis, weiji, includes elements of both danger and opportunity. This symbolic meaning has taken on especially great significance in recent years. The emergence of modern China as a global economic power can, in fact, be dated to the nation's willingness to seize critical moments of adversity. That was very much the case during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, which marked a critical turning point in the ascendance of China as a major economic power. And it could also be the case today. But there is an important catch: unlike earlier crises, it is not altogether clear that China senses the gravity of the current danger. That leaves it caught in something much closer to denial-making it difficult to seize the opportunity that peril can provide." READ MORE

U.S.-European Issues

FORUM: EUROPE, GUANTANAMO AND THE 'WAR ON TERROR': AN EXCHANGE. Nigel Inkster, Robert Whalley, Matthew Waxman, and Sibylle Scheipers, Survival, Spring 2009, pp. 55-70. "In the February-March 2009 issue of Survival ('Closing Guantanamo: Is Europe Ready?') Sibylle Scheipers discussed the role of US President Barack Obama's moves to reform the detention system as a step towards renewing close transatlantic ties and facilitating transatlantic cooperation. But she also argued that it poses a difficult challenge to Europeans. Survival invited comments from three distinguished experts, and Scheipers to respond." READ MORE

THE MICROSOFT JUDGMENT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPETITION POLICY TOWARDS DOMINANT FIRMS IN EUROPE. Christian Ahlborn, David S Evans, Antitrust Law Journal, 2009, pp. 887-932. "In this article the authors assess the implications of the Microsoft Judgment for European antitrust policies towards dominant firms which, under European Commission (EC) case law, may have market shares of as little as 40%. In doing so, they make three principal observations. First, the Microsoft Judgment largely reflects continuity with the European Court of First Instance's (CFI) review of appeals involving an abuse of a dominant position. Second, the Microsoft Judgment, as with previous judgments by the Community Courts regarding Article 82 EC, lacks limiting principles. Third, the approach the Community Courts have taken to abuse of dominance cases conflicts with their approach to merger clearance reviews and coordinated practices under Article 81 EC. The Microsoft case provided an important opportunity for the CFI to reshape Article 82 EC, or at least to signal that it was supportive of moving from form-based to effects-based analysis." READ MORE

MONETARY POLICY IN EUROPE VS THE US: WHAT EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE? Harald Uhlig, NBER Working Paper No. 14996, May 2009, var. pages. "This paper compares monetary policy in the US and EMU during the last decade, employing an estimated hybrid New Keynesian cash-in-advance model, driven by five shocks. It appears that the difference between the two monetary policies between 1998 and 2006 is due to both surprises in productivity as well as surprises in wage demands, moving interest rates in opposite directions in Europe and the US, but not due to a more sluggish response in Europe to the same shocks or to different monetary policy surprises." READ MORE

NATO Issues

FOR A NEW ATLANTIC ALLIANCE. Alessandro Minuto-Rizzo, Mediterranean Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp. 1-10. "The start of the Obama administration offers an opportunity to rebuild the US–NATO transatlantic link on the foundation of shared values during the Cold War and the immediate post–9/11 response. Use of military power is not sufficient, and torture should never again be condoned. Europe and the United States should take the lead in drafting new rules for the global economic order. A renewed NATO is also needed, as is a better relationship with Russia. NATO's eastward expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine makes sense in the long term but should not be pressed now." READ MORE

NATO'S FUTURE: FACING OLD DIVISIONS AND NEW THREATS. James Goldgeier, Harvard International Review, Spring 2009, pp. 48-51. "NATO has much to celebrate in the year of its 60th anniversary. In the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, NATO has incorporated much of Central and Eastern Europe into its membership. It responded to the threat that emerged on September 11, 2001 and sent troops far from home to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda and to help reconstruct a war-torn country. And the French decision to rejoin NATO's integrated military command after a four decade absence will enable deeper cooperation both across the Atlantic and within Europe. But while NATO has gone far in adapting to the world after the earth-shattering events of 11/9 and 9/11, it continues to confront the existential question it has faced since the end of the Cold War: is an alliance of transatlantic democracies built to counter a possible Soviet attack the best instrument for combating the threats of the 21st century? READ MORE

Multiculturalism and Diversity

NOT SO HUDDLED MASSES: MULTICULTURALISM AND FOREIGN POLICY. Scott McConnell, World Affairs, Spring 2009, pp. 39-50. "The modest contemporary literature on the connection between America's immigration and foreign policies contains this assertion by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, from the introduction to their 1974 volume Ethnicity: Theory and Experience: 'The immigration process is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy . . . This process regulates the ethnic composition of the American electorate. Foreign policy responds to that ethnic composition. It responds to other things as well, but probably first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity.' Yet, the authors noted a nearly complete absence of discussion of the issue, and they pursued it little themselves. Rather, they tossed it in as a supplement to their general argument: ethnicity was not going to wither away, leaving only colorful residues for annoyance or celebration. It would remain a primary form of social life in the United States."  READ MORE

DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT, JOB SATISFACTION, AND PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM U.S. FEDERAL AGENCIES. David Pitts, Public Administration Review, March/April 2009, pp. 328-338. "A number of organizations across sectors have begun efforts toward managing workforce diversity. At the federal level in the United States, almost 90 percent of agencies report that they are actively managing diversity. However, very little empirical research has tied diversity management to work group performance or other work-related outcomes. This paper uses a survey of U.S. federal employees to test the relationships between diversity management, job satisfaction, and work group performance. The findings indicate that diversity management is strongly linked to both work group performance and job satisfaction, and that people of color see benefits from diversity management above and beyond those experienced by white employees." READ MORE

WHILE EUROPE SLEPT. Jean Bethke Elshtain, First Things, March 2009, pp. 33-36. "If a culture forgets what it is, as I believe Europe has done, it falls first into an agnostic shrugging of the shoulders, unable to say exacdy what it is and believes, and from there it will inevitably fall into nihilism. Detached from its religious foundations, Europe will not remain agnostic. The first result is manifest in those ideologies of multiculturalism that make 'difference' a kind of sacred, absolute principle, although no principle is considered to have any such status. Difference tells us nothing in and of itself. Some ways of life and ways of being in the world are brutal, stupid, and ugly. Some a human rights-oriented culture cannot tolerate. A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission in order to make claims of value and to institutionalize them in social and political forms. This a post-Christian Europe cannot do." READ MORE

Values

WHAT MAKES US HAPPY.  Joshua Wolfshenk.  Atlantic Monthly, June 2009.  For more than 70 years, Harvard University researchers have been collecting data on a group of its male students to gain some insights into the keys to “successful living.” The collected data of what is known as the Grant Study, passed from one generation of researchers to another, amounts to a rare kind of longitudinal study. Wolfshenk is the first journalist to comb through the accumulated files and draw some conclusions about whether the data does what it set out to do. The primary researcher on the study for more than forty years says the lives of the 268 subjects, half of whom are now deceased, “were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.” On a more tangible level, researcher George Vaillant did identify a number of factors that seemed to mark a healthy transition from middle age to a healthy old age: education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of those who had most of these factors in their favor at age 50, half arrived at the age of 80 as happy and well. READ MORE

THE FUTURE OF BOOKS.  WILL TRADITIONAL PRINT BOOKS DISAPPEAR? Sarah Glazer, CQ Researcher, May 29, 2009, pp. 475-499. The migration of books to electronic screens has been accelerating with the introduction of mobile reading on Kindles, iPhones and Sony Readers and the growing power of Google's Book Search engine. Even the book's form is mutating as innovators experiment with adding video, sound and computer graphics to text. Some fear a loss of literary writing and reading, others of the world's storehouse of knowledge if it all goes digital. A recent settlement among Google, authors and publishers would make more out-of-print books accessible online, but some worry about putting such a vast trove of literature into the hands of a private company. So far, barely 1 percent of books sold in the United States are electronic. Still, the economically strapped publishing industry is under pressure to do more marketing and publishing online as younger, screen-oriented readers replace today's core buyers — middle-aged women.  READ MORE

REPRODUCTIVE ETHICS.  SHOULD FERTILITY MEDICINE BE REGULATED MORE TIGHTLY. Marcia Clemmitt. CQ Researcher, May 15, 2009, pp.  451-471.  Nadya Suleman, an unemployed, 33-year-old, single mother from Southern California, felt her six children weren't enough. Last January, after a fertility doctor implanted six embryos she had frozen earlier, Suleman gave birth to octuplets — and was quickly dubbed “Octomom.” Many fertility experts were shocked that a doctor would depart so far from medical guidelines — which recommend implantation of only one, or at most two, embryos for a woman of Suleman's relatively young age. Although multiple births often do result from in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other assisted-reproduction technologies, the number of multiples has dropped over the past few years, they point out. Other analysts note, however, that government statistics show a large percentage of clinics frequently ignore the guidelines on embryo implantation. In response, lawmakers in several states have introduced proposals to increase regulation of fertility clinics.  READ MORE

Economic crisis or crisis of capitalism?

LAST MAN STANDING.  Tyler Cowen.  Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp. 55-58.  The author, a professor of economics at George Mason University, believes that although America's relative decline in global affairs has been foretold many times, it never quite seems to happen. Today, the rest of the world is looking to the U.S. to pull it out of a recession (or depression), even though many blame us for having started it. The truth is that the worse things get for the world as a whole, the more the U.S. gains in relative power and influence. The U.S. has more demographics than many countries; with its relatively unified system of governance, the U.S. Federal Reserve can simply print money to fund bailouts, and even if that is an ugly alternative, the government's ability to act underpins the credibility of the system as a whole. The European Central Bank (ECB) is explicitly banned from creating more euros for bank bailouts; the Swiss central bank could, but the prospect of the resulting inflation and rapid depreciation of the Swiss franc makes this an unappealing choice, especially for a country that has marketed itself as a financial haven. It's not widely recognized that Europe, because of its systemic weaknesses, already has required implicit bailouts by the U.S. European financial institutions are prominent on the list of creditors of the failed insurance company AIG. Few U.S. financial regulators would say it openly, but one reason why the Fed rescued AIG was that it knew that European regulators could not handle the fallout from an AIG collapse. READ MORE

A SENSE OF UNREALITY.  Francis Fukuyama.  American Interest, May-June 2009.  The author writes that there is a “pervasive sense of unreality” in Washington about the scale of the economic crisis facing the U.S. and the rest of the world. The current administration’s economic policy team seems to be operating, says Fukuyama, on the assumption that the problem facing the financial system is one of illiquidity and not of insolvency, and that their task is to prop up the banks until their toxic assets can be fairly valued. The problems run deeper than that, says Fukuyama, resulting from years of Americans consuming and spending more than they were saving or producing, and trillions of dollars from abroad fueling the rapid increase of debt. He points out that this is a non-partisan crisis – both Republicans and Democrats were complicit in the deregulation of the financial sector that enabled the explosion of the shadow banking economy. The crisis is primarily a failure of U.S. public policy, writes Fukuyama, and “now that the public sector is cleaning up behind them, we need to move from astonishment to a different model of capitalism if we are to fix our own economy and regain a shred of credibility on the world stage.” READ MORE 

CAN AMERICA FAIL? Kishore Mahbubani.  Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2009, 48-54.  The author, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, believes that the massive crises that the U.S. is now experiencing are partly the product of three systemic failures. First, American society is afflicted with “groupthink,” having accepted the proclamations of economic gurus such as Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin that unregulated financial markets would naturally deliver economic growth and serve the public good. Second is the erosion of the notion of individual responsibility, as Americans cannot see how their individual actions have undermined, rather than strengthened, their society. Third is the inability of American society to see how the abuse of power has created many of the problems the U.S. now confronts abroad. The author sees the American people losing confidence in their ability to compete with Chinese and Indian workers. At the moment of their country's greatest economic vulnerability in many decades, few Americans dare to speak the truth and say that the U.S. cannot retreat from globalization; both the American people and the world would be worse off. However, as globalization and global capitalism create new forces of "creative destruction," America will have to restructure its economy and society in order to compete. READ MORE

Science & Education

UNCLE SAM: SCIENTIST.  Lisa A. DuBois.  Lens, Winter 2009, pp. 4-9.  During the past century, America reached the pinnacle of science and technology, thanks in no small measure to its immigrant spirit, diversity and genius for innovation. The U.S. outstripped all other countries in the number of science-related Nobel prizes awarded, in bringing new biotechnical products to the market, and in the amount of money spent on basic research. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, America’s position of strength can no longer be taken for granted, hindered by the triple-whammy of reduced federal funding for basic research, a flagging biotech industry, and a public education system rife that is failing to turn on young people to careers in the sciences. The author believes that this can be changed if new federal investment in basic research can shore up a struggling economy. DuBois fears that, without investment in science and education, the United States will become a second-rate country. READ MORE