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Topics in this
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November 9, 2009
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The President says there is much more to be done,
but cites the recent turnaround in GDP as a sign of better things to
come, and notes the Recovery Act has now created or saved more than
a million jobs. White House Photo, Samantha Appleton, 10/30/09
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President
Obama: One Year since his Election
OBAMA'S ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY. Various
authors. Time Online, n.d.
One year ago, Barack Obama was elected on a message most succinctly
defined by a single word: change. But while a week can be a lifetime
in politics, fifty-two weeks, it turns out, doesn't guarantee
transformation when it comes to policy, strategy or performance.
Obama and his team are well aware of the areas in which they have
fallen short of their campaign goals, especially those related to
amending how Washington does business, and the White House is
working hard to fulfill the president's promises.
Here, then, is Obama's mixed scorecard on changing the ways of the
Bush era. The bottom line: yes he can — some of the time, on some
things.
READ MORE
OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY REPORT CARD. Juan
Cole. Salon Online, n.d.
Why can't the administration of President Barack Obama get the word
out about its policy successes? President Obama campaigned on an
ambitious platform of withdrawing from Iraq, engaging Iran on its
nuclear program and persuading the Pakistani government to take on
the Taliban and al-Qaida. Despite the charge by critics from both
the right and the left in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace
Prize that he has accomplished little so far, in fact he has already
set in motion significant change on several of these fronts --
despite the enormous domestic tasks that have inevitably preoccupied
his administration. Yet you'd never hear about these successes from
the mainstream media.
READ MORE
HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES. ARE THEY A LOW
PRIORITY UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA? Kenneth Jost. CQ Weekly
Report, October 30, 2009, pp. 911-931. Human
rights advocates are voicing disappointment with what they have seen
so far of President Obama's approach to human rights issues in
forming U.S. foreign policy. They applaud Obama for working to
restore U.S. influence on human rights by changing President George
W. Bush's policies on interrogating and detaining terrorism
suspects. But they also see evidence that the Obama administration
is reluctant. . . .
READ MORE
THE OBAMA MOMENT: EUROPEAN AND
AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES. Álvaro de Vasconcelos and Marcin Zaborowski
(Eds.), EU Institute for Security
Studies, November 2009, var. pp.
"The election of Barack Obama has raised
major expectations in Europe and opened up new opportunities for
dealing with global challenges. Authored by leading experts from
both sides of the Atlantic, this book provides an authoritative
analysis of the most topical issues facing the European Union and
the United States' agendas of today. The volume addresses some
global questions - multilateralism, the economy, disarmament and
climate change - as well as key regional issues, including Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The book concludes that it is imperative that Europeans
and Americans seize 'the Obama moment' in order to capitalise on the
urgency of acting now. They will also need to move to a new paradigm
of the EU-US relationship and NATO's role within it - one that takes
account of the fact that the West needs 'the Rest' to deal with the
most pressing issues of our time."
READ MORE
Climate and Energy
U.S. ENERGY POLICY.
OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO ACTION. Max H. Bazerman,
Environment, September/October
2009, pp. 22-31. "The
issue of global climate change was identified decades ago. In
fact, it was first noted in the media in the 1930s, when a
prolonged period of warm weather demanded explanation, yet
interest in the matter disappeared as cooler temperatures
returned. For the past decade, most experts have accepted
climate change as a fact, making the issue difficult to
ignore—yet many politicians, and the voters who elect them, have
done exactly that. Scientists, policymakers, and others have
come up with good ideas to address climate change and other
energy issues including oil, transportation, and electricity
policies; carbon capture and storage; and the generation of
innovative energy solutions; many of the core aspects of these
ideas were developed long ago. However, predictable cognitive,
organizational, and political barriers prevent us from
addressing energy problems despite clearly identified courses of
action. This article borrows from the “predictable surprises”
framework that Harvard Business School professor Michael Watkins
and I developed to explain the human failure to act in time to
prevent catastrophes. It also borrows ideas from a paper on
cognitive barriers to addressing climate change. To focus the
discussion, I treat climate change as the exemplar
energy-related problem, but the ideas presented here are
relevant to the enactment of wise policies across a range of
issues, some of which I also discuss to demonstrate the dynamics
of these barriers."
READ MORE
COUNTDOWN
TO COPENHAGEN. Bruce Stokes, National Journal, 31 October
2009, var. pp. Stokes says that the negotiations at
the climate-change talks in Copenhagen in December promise to be a
daunting task. It is estimated that emissions will need to be cut by
50 percent by 2050 in order to hold the temperature rise to 2
degrees Celsius and carbon-dioxide concentrations to 450 parts per
million. The industrialized world’s goals at the conference will
reflect their publics’ acknowledgement of the seriousness of the
problem -- and in this, the U.S. lags behind the rest of the
developed world. The developing nations see binding commitments as
not in their national interest, noting that they account for only a
fraction of global emissions, and want the developed countries to
help pay for clean technology and environmental mitigation. Most
countries are reluctant to take action on their own, without seeing
that others are doing the same. Stokes says that “the central
challenge in Copenhagen may well be finding a way to nurture trust
and marry it with ambition . . . Coordinating these activities,
striking a balance between accountability and equity, and pursuing
the goals with sufficient urgency may prove to be among the most
daunting tasks that the global community has ever undertaken.”
READ MORE
ISSUE IN DESIGNING U.S. CLIMATE
CHANGE POLICY. Joseph E. Aldy, William A Pizer. The Energy
Journal, July 2009, pg. 179. "Over the coming
decades, the cost of U.S. climate change policy likely will be
comparable to the total cost of all existing environmental
regulation-perhaps 1-2 percent of national income. In order to
avoid higher costs, policy efforts should create incentives for
firms and individuals to pursue the cheapest climate change
mitigation options over time, among all sectors, across national
borders, and in the face of significant uncertainty.
Well-designed national greenhouse gas mitigation policies can
serve as the foundation for global efforts and as an example for
emerging and developing countries. We present six key policy
design issues that will determine the costs, cost-effectiveness,
and distributional impacts of domestic climate policy: program
scope, cost containment, offsets, revenues and allowance
allocation, competitiveness, and R&D policy. We synthesize the
literature on these design features, review the implications for
the ongoing policy debate, and identify outstanding research
questions that can inform policy development."
READ MORE
BULLET TRAINS FOR AMERICA? Mark
Reutter, The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2009, pp. 26-33.
"If President
Barack Obama has his way, American passenger rail will pick up speed
again. Earlier this year, he called for the creation of a national
high-speed rail network. The idea is not to lay track coast to
coast, but to focus on heavily populated corridors where short
distances between cities let fast trains compete effectively with
cars and planes. President Obama allocated $8 billion from the
economic stimulus package and requested $5 billion more from
Congress through 2014, which would be used as seed money for
improved rail service. "
READ MORE
Afghanistan
EXIT LESSONS. David M. Edelstein,
The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2009, var. pp.
"The results of such a study are chastening. Since the end of World
War II, the United States has been very active in the world, but it
has had no monopoly on large-scale intervention. [...] The debate
over exit strategies originated in America's painful experience
during the Vietnam War, which led some foreign-policy thinkers to
conclude that an exit plan should be a prerequisite for any military
intervention. The debate intensified in the 1990s, after the end of
the Cold War, as the United States undertook interventions that
appeared to be matters of choice more than necessity. In laying down
what came to be called the Powell Doctrine, then chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell included an exit strategy on his
list of conditions that should be met before the United States
committed forces overseas. But from Somalia to the Balkans and
Haiti, none of the subsequent conflicts to which U.S. forces were
committed in the 1990s met this condition, much less Powell's chief
principle that interventions must be directly tied to the long-term
security of American interests. These costly and inconclusive
efforts led critics to put even greater emphasis on questions about
how the story was going to end. "
READ MORE
IN AFGHANISTAN, TRAINING UP IS HARD TO
DO. Sydney Freedberg Jr. National Journal, 23 October
2009, var. pp. "In an
article profiling the commander of the 4th Brigade of the 82nd
Airborne Division, the author notes that training Afghan soldiers
will require more American advisors and troops, in order to reverse
the years of underinvestment in security in Afghanistan after 2003.
Freedberg writes that Afghanistan became an afterthought, with most
of the attention on Iraq; as a result, the situation in Afghanistan
today is probably worse than it was in Iraq several years ago. As
U.S. experience in Iraq has shown, it is difficult to separate the
advisory role from the fighting; American troops are necessary to
serve alongside the Afghans in order to reduce the threat to a level
where the Afghans can handle it on their own."
READ MORE
Education USA
AA FULBRIGHT PROGRAM ADAPTS TO OBAMA
ADMINISTRATION’S PRIORITIES. Beth McMurtrie. Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 23, 2009, pp. A29-A32.
The Obama Administration is putting its own stamp on the
Fulbright Program, the U.S. Government’s flagship international
exchange. In the lead article, Beth McMurtrie describes the new
priorities based on her interview with Alina L. Romanowski, the
State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for academic programs
in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Among the new
priorities: studies of such global issues as food security and
climate change through the Fulbright Science and Technology award;
the increased participation of U.S. community colleges; and the kind
of cultural diplomacy represented by the Fulbright Fellowships.
Three profiles of Fulbright programs follow. In the first, McMurtrie
looks at the role U.S. community colleges may play in Russia if a
high-level visit to Moscow by a group of community college
administrators in Spring 2010 develops as planned. In the second
profile, Shailaja Neelakantan looks at the Fulbright program in
India, which has doubled this year. In the third profile, Karin
Fischer describes how a university in California has taken advantage
of an underutilized Fulbright program that covers scholars’ travel
costs when they conduct guest lectures.
READ MORE
AA OPEN COURSES: FREE, BUT OH, SO COSTLY.
Marc Parry. Chronicle of Higher Education, October 16, 2009,
pp. A1, A16, A20. This lead in a series of articles
on the Open Courseware Movement focuses on the perils and prospects
for a phenomenon that some believe could end college as we know it,
but others believe is about to fail for lack of a business model.
MIT, the leader in open courseware, now offers almost 2,000 free
courses and has more than 1.3 million monthly visits to its website
and a $3.7 million annual budget. But each course costs
$10,000–$15,000 to put together. With the foundations that have
until now bankrolled open courseware projects reducing or
eliminating their funding, MIT now envisions fund-raising. Students
love the courses but want credit; critics worry that you can’t give
away a college education for free without undermining the
institutions that charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a
degree. Utah State recently dropped its open courseware project
after money from the state legislature and a foundation dried up.
The biggest question looming on the horizon: Will Congress fund the
Obama Administration’s $500 million proposal to build open courses
online? In “Around the World, Varied Approaches to Open Online
Learning,” Simmi Aujla and Ben Terris look at efforts ranging from
those in China and India to boost open courseware through government
support to those in the United Kingdom to make online learning more
truly collaborative and interactive. READ MORE
AMERICA FALLING: LONGTIME DOMINANCE IN
EDUCATION ERODES. Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education,
9 October 2009, pp. 1, 21-23. "The U.S. is still the top choice of international students; but by
many measures, U.S. preeminence in education is eroding. As evidence
of this erosion, Fischer cites the low percentage of Americans
graduating with majors in engineering, the declining percentage of
highly-qualified, low-income students who go to college and
continuing rounds of budget cuts. Many who start doctoral programs
fail to finish, especially women and minorities; more than half of
the doctorates awarded by U.S. institutions went to foreign
students. “I’m worried we won’t realize what’s at stake until it’s
too late,” says Charles Vest, former president of MIT. The current
economic and fiscal crisis has put U.S. public higher education in a
more precarious situation because federal and state requirements
have often put such programs as Medicaid and elementary and
secondary education off-limits for budget-cutting purposes, leaving
higher education to take the brunt of the cuts, as in California.
Some experts are calling for a larger federal role and long-term
strategic planning; others are leery of an enlarged federal role and
call instead for a national discussion of education. The U.S. system
was never designed to educate most Americans, says Patrick Callan,
president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher
Education; “We’re still stuck on having the best high-education
system of the 20th century, when it’s almost a decade into the 21st
century.” READ MORE
Non-Proliferation
IRAN: THE NUCLEAR STANDOFF: GIVE
ENGAGEMENT A CHANCE. David Mosher and Alireza Nader, The World
Today, November 2009, pp. 10-12. "Iran's recent
agreement to allow inspections of its secret uranium enrichment
facility is one of the first positive signs in recent years in the
west's effort to curtail Iran's nuclear programme. How significant a
step it is will only be clear months or perhaps years fromnow. But
it does suggest that theUnited States' new engagement approach has
the potential to bear some fruit. Although Iranian consent may be
just another play for time, buying time also can be in the west's
interest if it delays the acquisition of nuclear weapons."
READ MORE
WHAT DO THEY
REALLY WANT?: OBAMA's NORTH KOREA CONUNDRUM. Victor D. Cha, The
Washington Quarterly, October 2009, pp. 119-138.
"Negotiating with North Korea is all about contradictions. What can
be important one day can become unimportant the next. A position
they hold stubbornly for weeks and months can suddenly disappear.
But these contradictions tell us a lot about core goals that may lie
beneath Pyongyang’s
rhetoric and the provocative actions which culminated in a second
nuclear test
on May 25, 2009. Understanding these core goals, moreover, offers
insights into
how spectacularly unsuccessful North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has
been as he
prepares to step down. What do the North Koreans ultimately want
with their recent spate of provocative behavior? What is often
stated through the mouths of their foreign
ministry officials is only a part of the Pyongyang leadership’s
broader goals. The
judgments that follow are also informed by the experiences and ‘‘gut
instincts’’ of
those who have negotiated with the regime over the past sixteen
years."
READ MORE
NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND DISARMAMENT:
BEYOND 2010: IN THEIR HANDS.
Bruno Tertrais,
The World Today,
November 2009,
pp. 4-7. "In whose hands are
the real choices about nuclear weapons? Is
it the declared nuclear states and United
States President Barack Obama with his zero
option or 'rogue' nations like North Korea?
Will the initiative shift towards the Middle
East and Asia as it has on other global
issues?"
READ MORE
Economy
and Financial Markets
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS:
CAUSES AND CURES. Jacopo Carmassi, Daniel Gros and Stefano
Micossi, Journal of Common Market Studies,
November 2009, pp. 977-996
The massive financial instability of 2007–08 was, in the main,
the result of lax monetary policy. Regulation compounded this
error by allowing and encouraging excessive leverage and
maturity transformation by banks. Innovation did contribute to
reckless credit expansion and investments, but without lax money
and excessive leverage, reckless bets on asset price increases
would not have been possible. Therefore, a repeat of this
instability could be avoided by correcting these two policy
faults. There is no need for intrusive rules constraining
non-bank intermediaries and financial innovation. The main
message is: keep it simple.
READ MORE
DOLLAR DOMINANCE, EURO
ASPIRATIONS: RECIPE FOR DISCORD? Benjamin J. Cohen,
Journal of Common Market
Studies, September
2009, pp. 741–766.
After nearly a century of dominance of the
international monetary system, has the US dollar finally met its
match in the euro? When Europe’s economic and monetary union
(EMU) came into existence in 1999, many observers predicted that
the euro would soon join America’s greenback at the peak of
global finance. Achievements, however, have fallen short of
aspiration. After an initial spurt of enthusiasm, international
use of the euro actually appears now to be levelling off, even
stalling, and so far seems confined largely to a limited range
of market sectors and regions. The euro has successfully
attained a place second only to the greenback – but it remains,
and is likely to remain, a quite distant second without a
determined effort by EMU authorities to promote their money’s
global role. The temptation will surely be great. In practical
terms, it is difficult to imagine that EMU authorities will
refrain entirely from trying to promote a greater role for the
euro. But that, in turn, could turn out to be a recipe for
discord with the United States, which has never made any secret
of its commitment to preserving the greenback’s worldwide
dominance. A struggle for monetary leadership could become a
source of sustained tensions in US–European relations.
Fortunately, however, there seems relatively little risk of a
destabilizing escalation into outright geopolitical conflict.
READ MORE
THE FISCAL CRISIS: TRANSATLANTIC
MISUNDERSTANDINGS. Bernard E. Brown,
American Foreign Policy Interests,
September 2009 pp. 313–324. It is widely
believed in Europe that the fiscal crisis was caused by the
absence of government regulation of the financial sector in the
United States. This belief, the article argues, is an
oversimplification that encourages unrealistic hopes for quick
solutions and for a drastic shift of the balance of power from
the United States to the European Union and other actors. In
conclusion, the article points to underlying problems of the
‘‘market-state,’’ the dominant economic model in all advanced
democracies today.
READ MORE
REGULATION AND
SUPERVISION OF FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN THE EU: THE AFTERMATH
OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. Iain Begg, Journal of Common Market
Studies,
November 2009,
pp. 1107–1128.
"The financial crisis has reopened debate on the architecture
of financial regulation and prudential supervision in the EU,
calling into question the home country control principle that
has prevailed since the mid-1980s. This article discusses how
the growth of cross-border financial intermediation can best be
regulated to limit the ensuing risks of financial contagion. It
argues that a supranational supervisory system is now needed for
some intermediaries, but that proximity to market actors at
national level remains important. This points to a quasi-federal
system as the way forward, but in constructing such a system
account has to be taken of the diversity of Member State
structures and preferences. The article concludes that even if a
much more extensive EU-level competence is theoretically the
optimal way forward, political considerations make it unlikely,
suggesting that the crisis has broader implications for European
integration.
READ MORE
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