Today’s vote within the UN General Assembly gave overwhelming support to the Palestinian quest for nonmember status—marking a significant diplomatic development in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which should give pause to political leaders in Israel and the United States. Read more »

Two prominent political scientists, G. John Ikenberry of Princeton and Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins, have a new paper out guaranteed to give realists—and conservatives generally—fits. Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era is an unabashed liberal plea to restore the New Deal foundations of U.S. domestic as well as international policy. To preserve an open world order under the rule of law,  the authors contend, the United States must return to the principles it embraced under the administrations of FDR and Harry Truman, namely: a bipartisan commitment to liberal internationalism, solidarity with the world’s most established democracies, and a dedication to the progressive welfare state at home and abroad. Read more »

It’s telling that President Obama’s first foreign trip after winning reelection takes him to Asia, the historical hinge of the twenty-first century. The president will visit three Southeast Asian nations: He’ll mark one hundred and eighty years of diplomatic relations with Thailand, a staunch U.S. ally in the region. He’ll become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Myanmar, a nation emerging from five decades of military rule. And he’ll attend the East Asia Summit in Cambodia, reaffirming the presence of the United States as a Pacific power and a geopolitical counterweight to China. Read more »

In the wake of the U.S. reelection to the UN Human Rights Council, Ryan Kaminski, the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) Leo Nevas Human Rights Fellow, offers his analysis of how the Obama administration can take advantage of this election.

On November 12, the United States won a second term on the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), following a vote by the 193 members of the UN General Assembly. Read more »

—Cairo, November 12, 2012

It is a paradox of the modern Middle East that an area so rife with common security, economic, and ecological challenges should be such an institutional desert when it comes to regional cooperation. A fascinating two-day conference this weekend at the American University in Cairo (AUC) discussed whether recent political openings might portend deeper multilateral cooperation in the near future. Sponsored by AUC and the Council on Foreign Relations, the meeting on “Regional Cooperation in the New Middle East” offered only the faintest glimmers of hope that the Arab Spring would auger a new burst of multilateralism in the Middle East. Read more »

For more than a decade, the global conversation about development has been dominated by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established at the United Nations’ Millennium Summit of 2000, these eight objectives focused on what the international community could do to meet basic human needs in the developing world. Read more »

–Singapore (November 2, 2012)

The dynamic city-state and commercial entrepot of Singapore offers an ideal vantage point to consider the geopolitical and economic crosscurrents washing over East Asia. The past three years have underscored the contradictions between East Asia’s dual geoeconomic and geopolitical orders. Notwithstanding China’s modest recent slowdown, three decades of explosive growth have made it the region’s clear economic fulcrum. At the same time, regional stability remains undergirded by a “hub and spoke” system of longstanding bilateral alliances between the United States and China’s neighbors—including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand—as well as emerging security partnerships with Indonesia, Vietnam, and others. Read more »