Think Again: European Decline – By Mark Leonard and Hans Kundnani | Foreign Policy

Yes, you can make a strong case that Europe is not dead–and that it still may be the best example of the way forward in an era of non-state threats, failed states, and even in the shadow of its own financial crisis.

Power, of course, depends not just on these resources but on the ability to convert them to produce outcomes. Here too Europe delivers: Indeed, no other power apart from the United States has had such an impact on the world in the last 20 years. Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has peacefully expanded to include 15 new member states and has transformed much of its neighborhood by reducing ethnic conflicts, exporting the rule of law, and developing economies from the Baltic to the Balkans. Compare that with China, whose rise is creating fear and provoking resistance across Asia. At a global level, many of the rules and institutions that keep markets open and regulate world trade, limit carbon emissions, and prosecute human rights abusers were created by the European Union. Who was behind the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court? Not the United States or China. Its Europe that has led the way toward a future run by committees and statesmen, not soldiers and strongmen.

via Think Again: European Decline – By Mark Leonard and Hans Kundnani | Foreign Policy.

The Moral Obligation to Be Persuasive – Ars Politica

A much smarter version of my argument that “persuasion matters” from a clearly superior mind.

What Athena understands and Apollo does not is this: those of us who live in a free society and sincerely believe that we are right have a moral obligation to be persuasive. Telling people that they are stupid, evil, bigoted, and useless does not work. It persuades nobody, and it does not advance the agendas that we think we are fighting for. Real persuasion requires wisdom, patience, respect, compassion, and a good sense of strategy. And even when our motives are pure, we must hold ourselves accountable for the good that we fail to do because our methods are flawed.

via The Moral Obligation to Be Persuasive – Ars Politica.

Booklist: A Preview of Schmidt & Cohen, The New Digital Age

A series of early interviews on NPR this week are setting the stage for a new book from Google’s CEO and former State Department technology guru who works for Google’s in-house think tank. They explore the promise and limits of information–and implications for the Arab Spring, repressive regimes, and the changing role of nation-sates.

Schmidt: “The power of information is underrated. When we went to North Korea, we felt that if there was any way we could help get that country on the right track, [it] would be to get a little bit of Internet into the country. In many countries, the Internet is the only way to get an alternative point of view in, and the Internets arrival could destabilize some of these autocratic regimes, who we believe will fight it. They cant completely shut it off, because the Internet is too important for their business and their other goals, so a little bit of Internet in there will bring some openness and some ideas to every single country.”Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways. North Korea is the last stop. Its the one country thats never had the Internet, where its been blocked — in my view, very harshly — by the government. All they have to do is turn it on a little bit, and they cant turn it back. Once the ideas are in, you cannot kick them out of the country.

via Interview: Eric Schmidt And Jared Cohen, Authors Of The New Digital Age : All Tech Considered : NPR.

George Mitchell and the Nuts & Bolts of Peacemaking in Northern Ireland

Terms like “negotiation,” “peace,” and “diplomacy” are grandiose and frequently used  without a clear definition.  The reality of a peace agreement in Northern Ireland is fact and how that process occurred–despite enmity, politics, culture, and history, is the story of George Mitchell, a U.S. special envoy:

The true art of peace, negotiators know, lies in our ability to deal with the mighty weapon of language.

Mr. Mitchell’s great skill was that he learned to embrace silence. He sat at his table, listening to speech after speech. He soon found out that perhaps no other culture in the world has as many skilled and loquacious loudmouths as Ireland, north and south. (The old joke goes that Irish people with Alzheimer’s forget everything except the grudge.) He pitched himself against the tenacity of the fanatics.

He was unpaid and initially unheralded, but he fell in love with the people and allowed them to talk through their vitriol. He tried never to take sides — he split a feather down the middle and encouraged both halves to take flight.

via Remembering an Easter Miracle in Northern Ireland – NYTimes.com.

How We Think About Ethics is Wrong

Ethics for diplomats is very different from the ethical considerations of international relations–so its nice to take the micro approach occasionally.  New research looks into how moral reasoning can be skewed and what we can do about it.

For a recent paper to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, subjects were made to think either abstractly or concretely — say, by writing about the distant or near future. Those who were primed to think abstractly were more accepting of a hypothetical surgery that would kill a man so that one of his glands could be used to save thousands of others from a deadly disease. In other words, a very simple manipulation of mind-set that did not change the specifics of the case led to very different responses.

via Our Inconsistent Ethical Instincts – NYTimes.com.

Booklist | ‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr – NYTimes.com

In the NYT review of Vali Nasr, dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS, Michiko Kakutani gives a longer treatment of this foreign policy insider critique of the Obama foreign policy process.

In this book Mr. Nasr contends that “the White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s video conferences” with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, “and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”“The White House,” Mr. Nasr says, “resented losing AfPak to the State Department,” and “that was one big reason” it was “on a warpath with Holbrooke — he was in their way and kept the State Department in the mix on an important foreign policy area.”

Mr. Holbrooke, he goes on, “would not cede ground to the White House, not when he thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their depth and not up to the job.”Mr. Nasr describes Mr. Holbrooke who oversaw the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia as “a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger.”

And he uses his own in-depth knowledge of the geopolitics of the Middle East to make an impassioned case for many of Mr. Holbrooke’s diplomatic initiatives and ideas, which often failed to find traction within the White House.

via ‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr – NYTimes.com.

The United States of America: Geography Matters

Not a clear case of geographic determinism from Aaron David Miller, rather a nicely argued explanation that American pragmatism, idealism, arrogance, and ambivalence can be understood in a geographic frame.  (Of course many other factors play equally–and in some cases, more important roles.) But as they say in real estate, location matters.

On Pragmatism: Americans belief in solutions is both endearing and naive. I think that as the United States gets older as a nation, Americans are coming to accept theologian Reinhold Niebuhrs notion that the best we can do is come up with proximate solutions to insoluble problems. …

Idealism: The luxury of America’s circumstances — particularly its physical security and detachment from the world’s ethnic and tribal quarrels — has given Americans an optimistic view of their future. And it has produced a strain in U.S. foreign policy that seeks to do good across the globe. …

Arrogance/Ambivalence: Being powerful and relatively free from the threat of attack means Americans don’t have to care much about what the rest of the world thinks. And like all big powers prior, America has taken full advantage of this privilege: It has championed human rights while supporting dictators and has mouthed support for the United Nations and international law while undermining both when U.S. interests demanded it. America’s recent behavior in the Middle East serves as a case study: The United States encouraged reform in Egypt and largely ignored political unrest in Bahrain, highlighted women’s rights in Egypt but not in Saudi Arabia, and intervened in Libya but not Syria.

via How Geography Explains the United States – By Aaron David Miller | Foreign Policy.

UK | Granta’s Writer List Highlights Cosmopolitan Britain

One manifestation of immigrant integration can be seen in literary pursuits.  According to Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary and Little Bee, “London’s literary scene is absolutely rocking at the moment”…  “You couldn’t invent it. There are 300 languages, 72 major nationalities…”

So when an important lit mag points to the “best”–and they mirror a cosmopolitan, hypernetworked, up-and-coming set, its hard not to see the linkages:

“The right-wing press will undoubtedly say it’s the end of the world, it’s all these foreigners, people with funny surnames, coming over and taking our novels, yada, yada, yada,” Ms. Kennedy predicted. “It’s the nature of the beast” but unjustified, she added, because London today “is a teeming mass of different voices” that need to be reflected and represented in literature.

via Granta Names Best Young British Novelists – NYTimes.com.

How Raymond Davis Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States – NYTimes.com

A spy tale of a “diplomat”–that just happens to be true–explains a lot about the complex challenge to understand Pakistan.

With Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued that it was essential to go immediately to the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to cut a deal. The U.S. would admit that Davis was working for the C.I.A., and Davis would quietly be spirited out of the country, never to return again. But the C.I.A. objected. Davis had been spying on a militant group with extensive ties to the I.S.I., and the C.I.A. didn’t want to own up to it. Top C.I.A. officials worried that appealing for mercy from the I.S.I. might doom Davis. He could be killed in prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to release him on the grounds that he was a foreign diplomat with immunity from local laws — even those prohibiting murder. On the day of Davis’s arrest, the C.I.A. station chief told Munter that a decision had been made to stonewall the Pakistanis. Don’t cut a deal, he warned, adding, Pakistan is the enemy.

The strategy meant that American officials, from top to bottom, had to dissemble both in public and in private about what exactly Davis had been doing in the country. On Feb. 15, more than two weeks after the shootings, President Obama offered his first comments about the Davis affair. The matter was simple, Obama said in a news conference: Davis, “our diplomat in Pakistan,” should be immediately released under the “very simple principle” of diplomatic immunity. “If our diplomats are in another country,” said the president, “then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”

Calling Davis a “diplomat” was, technically, accurate. He had been admitted into Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. But there was a dispute about whether his work in the Lahore Consulate, as opposed to the American Embassy in Islamabad, gave him full diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. And after the shootings in Lahore, the Pakistanis were not exactly receptive to debating the finer points of international law. As they saw it, Davis was an American spy who had not been declared to the I.S.I. and whom C.I.A. officials still would not admit they controlled. General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, spoke privately by phone and in person with Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., to get more information about the matter. He suspected that Davis was a C.I.A. employee and suggested to Panetta that the two spy agencies handle the matter quietly. Meeting with Panetta, he posed a direct question.

via How Raymond Davis Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States – NYTimes.com.

Getting the UN House in Order: Ethics, Whistleblowers, and the Eternal Case for Reform

What does the UN response to Mr. Wasserstrom’s case say about the moral authority of the institution?  According to the Government Accountability Project, the U.N.’s ethics office received 343 inquiries–and this is only part of a part of a series of problems that render the institution susceptible to critics.

Even though he won his case, Mr. Wasserstrom said a United Nations oversight panel judge’s decision last month to award him only $65,000 of his claimed $3.2 million in total damages had sent a message that “clearly tells U.N. staff that even when a whistle-blower wins, he loses.”

The coercive pressure of the withholding threat, Mr. Wasserstrom said in a letter to Mr. Kerry, could force changes in what Mr. Wasserstrom described as an organizational culture in which “U.N. personnel who are aware of misconduct, corruption and fraud are likely to remain silent.”

via Aggrieved U.N. Whistle-Blower Seeks Withholding of U.S. Funds – NYTimes.com.

 

Other issues include the Haiti outbreak, the negative impact of peacekeeping missions, and the institutional politics–baked into the structure–that reduce risk-taking, give every country a voice (even when they don’t warrant it), among other issues.