FPA’s Must Reads (May 3 to May 10)

The Thin Red Line
By Dexter Filkins
New Yorker

President Obama has said on numerous occasions that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be his “red line” and a “game changer” in the United States’ approach to the Syrian civil war. Filkins investigates the White House’s debate on Syria and the issues behind an intervention after the “searing experiences” of Iraq and Afghanistan.

My father, the good Nazi
By Philippe Sands
Financial Times

Otto von Wächter, the former Nazi governor of Galicia and Krakow, has been identified as a war criminal since 1942. His son, Horst, denies his crimes — who is by no means the first child of a Nazi official to do so — even after Sands approaches him with documentation on the atrocities.

U.S. cyberwar strategy stokes fear of blowback
By Joseph Menn
Reuters

As the U.S. confronts its rivals over use of cyber warfare, it has rapidly become the biggest offensive player on the cyber field. But as the defense industry continues to offer “bounties” to hackers who have uncovered critical exploits, some policy makers are beginning to wonder if this may, in the end, be harmful to U.S. security.

China: Year Zero
By Christian Caryl
Foreign Policy

As Caryl points out, sometimes “it is inevitable…that we tend to focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions.” However, leaders aren’t the only actors in this transformation. Caryl tells the story of how China jolted its economy not only to life, but brought it to the fast lane.

Maggie
By Andrew O’Hagan
The New York Review of Books

Andrew O’Hagan reflects on “Thatcherism” and its effect on Britain from the perspective of growing up in a small Scottish mining town. And even as she drove the nation apart — by pitting not just political parties against each other, but the north and the south of Britain — perhaps her greatest legacy was “to have made Britain a place more out of love with the idea of tolerance.”

Blogs:

A Cheat Sheet to Pakistani Elections by Zainab Jeewanjee
A Candid Discussion with Cliff Kupchan by Reza Akhlaghi
Solving Syria – A dilemma for the West by Maxime Larive
Red Lines, Syria, and Rhetoric by Julia Knight
The Politics of Guantánamo by Scott Monje