U.S. lawmakers may be preparing for their summer recess (and just in time to escape a brutal DC heat wave), but the news cycle will certainly not be slowing down. Join Jim Lindsay and me, filling in for Bob MacMahon, on The World Next Week podcast as we discuss the upcoming crisis meeting on Syria in Geneva, Mexican presidential elections, and the upcoming budget challenges that Congress will need to confront to avert “taxmaggedon”. Read more »

Today, the Internationalist is writing from the floor of the United Nations in New York, where Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Yury Fedotov, among others, have gathered for the hundredth anniversary of the landmark 1912 Opium Convention and the 2012 International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. To mark the occasion and attempt to progress in the world’s fight against transnational crime, today’s thematic debate focuses on drugs and crime as a threat to development. Below is a summary of my prepared remarks to the panel. Read more »

As the UN Conference on Sustainable Development—more popularly known by its moniker, “Rio+20”—wraps up today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, initial reports from the summit are bleak. The final outcome document, painstakingly hashed out in down-to-the-wire negotiations, contains few concrete and time-specific commitments. The World Wildlife Federation dubbed the text a “colossal failure,” a sentiment echoed by the European Union, which lamented the document’s “lack of ambition.” Read more »

As often happens at G20 summits, the major diplomatic action in Los Cabos is taking place not in plenary sessions devoted to the world economy, but in discreet conversations between world leaders. Witness the bilateral meeting yesterday between presidents Obama and Putin over the deteriorating situation in Syria. That conversation suggested the outlines of a potential breakthrough, as both sides stare into the abyss of an all-out Syrian civil war. In their closing statement, Obama and Putin committed to the common goal of a “political transition to a democratic, pluralistic political system that would be implemented by the Syrians themselves.” Making tangible progress toward this objective will require restraint on the part of the Obama administration, and the stomach to grant Putin the outsized diplomatic role he craves as mediator. Read more »

On Sunday, one day after Greeks vote in elections that may result in their withdrawal from the eurozone, and throw that single currency union into untested waters, leaders from the world’s twenty largest economies will gather in Los Cabos, Mexico, at the Group of Twenty (G20) summit. The eurozone crisis will undoubtedly dominate, but under the surface there are important issues of global cooperation that the leaders must not forget. Read more »

World leaders will gather June 18-20 in Los Cabos, Mexico, for the Group of Twenty nations summit. Watch the Internationalist interview below with Enrique Berruga, the president of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, about the upcoming meeting and future of the group. Read more »

The ratcheting up of violence in Syria, including the massacres of civilians in Houla and Qubair, is placing extraordinary pressure on the Obama administration to match its tough anti-atrocities rhetoric with practical action. The pending failure of the Annan peace plan, and the former secretary-general’s declaration that the country is headed for “all-out civil war,” is quickly driving the White House toward an unenviable election-year choice: either sit back and watch the carnage, or forge an ad hoc coalition to prevent Syrian depredations. Senior administration officials have made it clear that if the UN Security Council (UNSC) fails to “assume its responsibilities,” in the words of U.S. envoy Susan E. Rice, “members of this council and members of the international community are left with the option only of having to consider whether they’re prepared to take actions outside of the Annan Plan and the authority of this council.”   Read more »

It is high time the United States joined 162 other states and the European Union in becoming party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—thirty years after the Reagan administration first negotiated the treaty.

On May 23, the White House dispatched its big guns to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator Kerry is holding hearings on UNCLOS. The message from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, was unequivocal: Acceding to the treaty is profoundly in the U.S. national interest. Read more »

Since the creation of the Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2006, U.S. critics have repeatedly tarred the HRC as a feckless haven for human rights abusers and a platform for egregious attacks of Israel. By their reckoning, President George W. Bush was correct to wash his hands of the body, whereas Barack Obama sullied his own in bringing the United States into the body in 2009. But critics overlook transformational improvements. The HRC remains deeply imperfect. But thanks to the Obama administration’s dogged diplomacy, it has started to turn the corner, gaining “newfound credibility as a human rights watchdog.” Read more »