Entries tagged as ‘alliances’
This new book looks at the biology and psychology of human cooperation–an important concept premise for multilateralism:
Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she’s likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to.
As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.
via Why We Cooperate – The MIT Press.
Categories: international organization
Tagged: alliances, booklist
Is your discipline becoming useless? If your a Political Science major, a major debate inside the discipline warrants consideration. A small faction has broken with the majority–and is now backed by Senator Tom Coburn, Repub of OK who called NSF funding “wasting federal research.”
What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”
via Field Study – Just How Relevant Is Political Science? – NYTimes.com.
Categories: negotiation
Tagged: alliances
Role reversal, l’amie?
But there’s something that’s not clear: how this America reacts now when it’s told it’s behaving weakly, indecisively, or perhaps deceptively in inadequately trying to stop Iran’s rush toward a nuclear weapon.
Which is just the argument that France’s nuclear nonproliferation experts are making. They suggest the Americans are selling likely Iranian trickery as hopeful signs, and toying with potential agreements with the mullahs that resemble the American concessions on North Korea which have led only to its nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
Their warnings can be blunt: that the United Sates is playing a flabby, losing game against Iran; and even that it’s failed to arouse any nervousness in Tehran that the Americans would eventually dare acknowledge the failure of current negotiations, or subsequent sanctions, and consider a military strike on Iranian nuclear installations.
These French concerns are not feigned. Why this so-called French hawkishness?
via Politicus – This Time, the Hawks Are French – NYTimes.com.
Categories: current events
Tagged: alliances, national security, Security Council
Sitting at UN conferences, one has to ask the hard question: what difference do these meetings really make? Beyond the soft law accretion, public awareness and mobilization, and other real effects–how do we explain the failure of agreements over the past 10 years, and the lack of signitories to keep their committments to the most important of the most recent one, the Milennium Development Goals?
The big idea, courtesey of Moises Naim in FP.com:
The pattern is clear: Since the early 1990s, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared, but at the same time multilateral talks have inevitably failed; deadlines have been missed; financial commitments and promises have not been honored; execution has stalled; and international collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed. These failures represent not only the perpetual lack of international consensus, but also a flawed obsession with multilateralism as the panacea for all the world’s ills.
So what is to be done? To start, let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.
via Minilateralism: The magic number to get real international action. – By Moisés Naím | Foreign Policy.
Count on Steven Walt to cite this as an idea close to his heart:
Need I point out that this is a decidedly realist approach? Realists have always emphasized the role of power and argued that the agenda of world politics — including the prospects for meaningful cooperation — depends mostly on the actions of the major powers.
But…an idea that he notes, “will work in some contexts but not in others.” Perhaps a dose of realism is what institutions and arrangements based on idealism need to make them more pragmatic and workable.
Categories: international organization
Tagged: alliances, decision making, UN reform
What’s Happening Now
In Context
Reading list for the more policy-inclined, from Foreign Affairs magazine.
“Ignore All the Experts” and a helpful essay on the reality of confusion and the fact that most experts are/will be wrong, according to Charles Kurzman, FP.com.
And, from an expert…human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, via The Lede, NYT:
In order to calm the situation, a few things must be done. First of all, all the people who have been arrested and detained must be freed immediately. All government violence must be ordered to be stopped and the government should stop dealing with the people in an aggressive manner. The election should be voided and new elections must be held. The new elections should be held under the supervision of international observers. The families of those injured and killed should be paid compensation. When I asked if that was a realistic formula, she said, “The people are very angry and they are not going to relent this time…. I hope the government is clever enough to realize this.”
The election was stolen. Discussion with Iran-watcher, writer, and CNN analyst, Reza Aslan.
Helfpul new discovery in the blog On Message, noting that the regime aims to calm things down in Tehran, but nationwide protests may prove too difficult for the government to resist.
Motivation for the street from “Tehran’s Eternal Youth“?:
But young Iranians now seem more likely to fight for their rights and die trying, rather than abandon their country and seek asylum abroad as so many of us have done over the last 30 years.
How the Ayatollah gained his power, and why he could lose it:
Still, lacking a political base of his own, he set about creating one in the military. It was the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and many senior officers returning from the front demanded a role in politics or the economy for their sacrifices. Ayatollah Khamenei became a source of patronage for them, giving them important posts in broadcasting or as leaders of the vast foundations that had confiscated much of the pre-revolution private sector.
“By empowering them, he got power,” said Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the wake of the election debacle, questions are being raised about who controls whom. But over the years, Ayatollah Khamenei gradually surmounted expectations that he would be eclipsed.
“He is a weak leader, who is extremely smart in allying himself, or in maneuvering between centers of power,” said one expert at New York University, declining to use his name because he travels to Iran frequently. “Because of the factionalism of the state, he seems to be the most powerful person.”
What Should the US Do?
Categories: current events
Tagged: alliances, conflicts, leadership, Middle East
Simulating artificial intelligence “alliances”:
Which could happen before long. Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache
via Robots forming human-like societies – electronic evolution? // Current.
Categories: negotiation
Tagged: alliances
Some cynics may balk and call it cronyism, but face it—whether you’re building a coalition, campaign or administration, you tap those you trust. Interesting discussions on who Obama trusts (in other words, those who have helped him, connect with him personally, and can contribute in a new admin), as lesson for diplomatic-bloc-builders:
As he looks to build a presidency from scratch, Mr. Obama recognizes that he needs at least some of the expertise of the Clinton circles, advisers said. Most telling was his decision even before the election to tap Mr. Podesta, founder and president of the Center for American Progress, a Washington group widely viewed as Mrs. Clinton’s government-in-waiting until she lost. [NYT]
The senator’s network of black executives, lawyers, fund-raisers and advisers stretches from Chicago to Cambridge, Mass., to Wall Street to Washington, D.C. In many ways, their careers mirror that of the candidate himself. They are graduates of Ivy League and other prestigious colleges and law schools. They ascended the ranks of mainstream corporate America, often accumulating great wealth in the process. They’ve been adept at navigating elite white precincts while retaining ties to the black community. They are also bound by an intricate social web that operates largely out of sight from whites: family connections, black law-school alumni organizations, black fraternities and sororities, as well as popular vacation spots for affluent African-Americans like Martha’s Vineyard. [WSJ]
And smart speculation from some very interesting/impressive people at Poltico’s “The Arena.” Also, it sounds like if you want to work on security issues, saying less is more.
Categories: diplomacy · leadership
Tagged: alliances
What is the EU? A growing alliance of nations? A home in Brussels (and Strausbourg) for a nation once divided by two major wars? An economic powerhouse, the United States of Europe?
Sum-up: core values exist, except in practice. A bit of utopic pragmatism in the veins of ‘we know what we want, but we haven’t yet found the best way to get it’, may be a solution. Europe already has a kratos, or an institutional building. What it doesn’t have is a demos, or a European people: people that think as Europeans, and not just as part of their national communities. Cafe Babel
UPDATE | Another challenge appears to be the economic tsunami caused by the US credit crisis–noted in both the WSJ and NYT.
Categories: comparative politics
Tagged: alliances
Karzai’s Afghanistan + Saudi Arabia
As the Afghan war intensifies and American commanders call for increased troop levels, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that he had repeatedly sought the intervention of the Saudi royal family to bring the resurgent Taliban to peace negotiations. (Find out why at NYT)
Tom Brokaw + McCain Campaign
But less widely known is that Mr. Brokaw has also played a pivotal role out of public view, both within NBC and in its dealings with the campaign of John McCain in particular.
Russia’s Supreme Court + Czar Nicholas II
The ruling is the latest step in Russia’s post-Soviet reinterpretation of history, which has seen a new embrace of a monarchy once castigated for brutality and backwardness, accompanied by both nostalgia for and damning reconsiderations of seven decades of Soviet rule.
Pakistan + United States
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
DOD + clear language
- Non-Ionizing Radiation Vision for A New Army (NIRVANA)
- Point of Origin (POO)
- Fast-Rope Infiltration / Exfiltration System (FRIES)
- Photon-Trap Structures for Quantum Advanced Detectors (PT-SQUAD)
- Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office (DISCO)
Categories: current events
Tagged: alliances
In case you missed the last eight years, we had some interesting drama between historic friends (Bush, Rumsfeld, and “Old Europe”) but with Sarkozy’s rise in France, things got back to normal. Bush hugged the German Chancellor and all was forgiven. (Now the animosity has shifted to the former “Evil Empire,” then wounded Bear, and now resurgent rival–Russia.)
But the French still try to channel their inner Tocqueville to understand America–apparently to no avail:
They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as “Sarko the American.”
But this year has been difficult for the French. Mr. Sarkozy has generally supported American foreign policy and has praised the United States’ openness and entrepreneurial verve. And the sudden emergence of Senator Barack Obama — black, and seen as elegant and engaged with the larger world — has sent many French into a swoon.
But the combination of two recent surprises — Gov. Sarah Palin and America’s terrifying financial meltdown — has brought older, nearly instinctual anti-American responses back to the surface.
These two surprises, one after the other, have refreshed clichés retailed under President Bush, confirming the deeply held belief of the French that the United States remains the frontier, led by impenetrably smug and incurious upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom.
Categories: diplomacy · foreign policy
Tagged: alliances, country role
