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José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has been a leading proponent of strong action against climate change, not only in the 27-nation European Union, but globally.  The EU has been in the vanguard, particularly when the executive branch of the US was for eight years a captive to special interests and a politics […]

The Foreign Policy Association’s Children’s Blogger, Cassandra Clifford, has a chapter in the newly released ‘At Issue: Slavery Today’, designed for middle and high school students. Cassandra, who is also the Executive Director and Founder of Bridge to Freedom Foundation, which assists survivors of modern slavery, including victims of sexual and other coerced labor trafficking such as […]

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave an emotional apology on Sunday to the victims of a largely forgotten chapter of Western history. Addressing a crowd of about 1000 former child migrants, Rudd issued a national apology for the mistreatment they received from the government when they had been promised a new chance and a new […]

President Obama did a good job this week in China.  Goodwill is a valuable intangible in politics, and he engendered some on his Asian trip.  Still, the gloss is off the family car — the superpower with hat in hand is an oxymoron.  The spectacle of the United States having to go to Beijing to […]

If the United States is going to criticize Pakistan for not securing their border with Afghanistan, maybe we should be making sure that the other side of the border is sealed, too.

Stephen Walt is spot on with this blog post. COIN enthusiasts are among the many in Washington who believe American foreign policy must maintain an aggressive missionary aspect. This isn’t really a problem—we should be striving to make the world a better place—but it currently manifests itself in ways that are prone to failure and […]

Foreign Policy asks the question: “Who Killed Copenhagen?” FP does list hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), but the real culprit is the institution itself: the United States Senate. Indeed, the Senate is where bills go to die. American healthcare reform has been slowed and stalled throughout the year in the upper house. But […]

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore last Sunday, Barack Obama acknowledged what many had suspected all along: that a comprehensive climate deal in Copenhagen, next month, is “beyond reach.”  On a 3-day visit to China this week, Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao suggested that Copenhagen will be used instead as a […]

David Brooks on the NewsHour this past Friday proffered an all too familiar argument.  Speaking about the decision to try 9/11 suspects in civilian courts in New York, Brooks said: This trial will become another act of propaganda. The future trials will become other acts of propaganda. And I think we have to understand that […]

Many of you may have heard on the news about a missing five-year-old Shaniya Davis from Fayetteville, North Carolina, which first broke news this week as news of her disappearance led authorities into a desperate search for her safe return.  The young girl was reportedly taken from the mobile-home of her mother while on a […]

How about some entertainment news? I know you don’t come to the Foreign Policy Association for entertainment news, but I thought perhaps my U.S. Role readers would be interested in a new television project by the CBS network. They are producing an end-of-the-decade look at America’s position in the world that will feature reports from […]

Kai Eide, the Special Representative of the United Nations to Afghanistan, did not mix words.  Addressing the Committee of Development at the European Parliament in Brussels this evening, Mr. Eide began to vent some frustration against NGOs and INGOs. He was  vague and did not single out any organisation in particular. Instead he said that […]