The new year is a time of hope. As 2013 dawns, optimists yearn for a period of sustained global economic growth after five years of recession, turbulence, and sluggish recovery. Achieving this scenario will require close policy coordination among governments of the world’s major economies. This places a heavy burden on the Russian Federation, which on December 1 assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Group of Twenty (G20). Read more »

Mathew Burrows, counselor to the National Intelligence Council, may have the most fascinating job in Washington. Every four to five years he coordinates the U.S. intelligence community’s crystal-ball gazing exercise, which imagines what the future will bring fifteen to twenty years hence. The sixth and most recent installment, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, offers an eye-opening  glimpse into the turbulent world we will inherit as middle classes grow, power shifts to developing countries, demographics change, and humanity confronts daunting ecological constraints. Read more »

– Moscow

Having recently assumed the rotating chair of the Group of Twenty (G20), the Russian government is now soliciting input on the agenda for its September 2013 meeting in St. Petersburg. Yesterday I contributed to these deliberations as a member of the “Think20”network—a consortium of independent experts from around the world. My own advice to the Russian sherpa, Ksenia Yudaeva, was that Russia should transform the G20’s nascent development agenda to address the pressing challenge of fragile states. Read more »

The Senate’s appalling rejection this week of the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities was a cruel and petulant gesture, particularly during the holiday season. Relishing the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge was Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania. Unbowed by his drubbing in the GOP presidential primary, the firebrand led the charge against an innocuous treaty—negotiated by George W. Bush no less—whose sole purpose is to extend to other countries the protections afforded to the disabled in the United States. Santorum’s specious claim that the convention posed a mortal threat to U.S. national sovereignty, which convinced enough of his former colleagues to block ratification, speaks volumes about the Republican Party’s antipathy towards international treaties—and the absurd lengths it will go to resist them. Read more »

The Persian Gulf is receiving plenty of press this week, as climate negotiators debate in Doha and political turmoil buffets Bahrain. But another important drama is unfolding in Dubai, where more than one hundred and fifty nations are meeting for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit) from December 4-13. Topping the agenda is the future governance of the internet. A bloc of developing countries and authoritarian states is pushing for a sweeping new treaty that would wrest authority for regulating the internet from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and hand it to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  Fortunately, the United States, European Union, and private sector have mobilized to block this nightmare scenario, which would threaten the free and open character of the internet. Read more »

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 »