http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com The World Affairs Blog Network Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:27:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It has been painfully obvious since the advent of the current age of terrorism that the  loathsome tactics of terrorists do not correspond to the kinds of behavior the Geneva Conventions were written to regulate.  International law envisions nation states and their uniformed armies.  But what about when the perpetrators ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/19/justice-in-the-face-of-terror/ U2 and Bon Jovi, Hillary Clinton and Lech Walesa, Placido Domingo, Mikhail Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger.  They were all on hand in Berlin today to mark the 2oth Anniversary of the rupture of the Berlin Wall.  Of all the shattering events in German history that took place on November 9th ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/09/from-119-to-911/ After months of debate, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed health care legislation.  Although not a foreign policy issue, the vote is consequential for the Obama Administration, the United States and ultimately the U.S. role in the world. The legislation is not yet law.  The U.S. Senate has yet to ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/07/health-care-gets-a-house-call/ Last week could not have been an easy one for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Traveling to Pakistan, she arrived just as the Taliban began a fresh wave of bombings.  When she headed for Israel, Netanyahu made plain that his government would not stop settlement expansion in the West Bank.  ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/02/legitimacy-bestowed/ When the media make news, objectivity generally suffers.  So it was this past week with not one, but two, major stories about the media in the media.  The first was the ideological conflict between Barack Obama’s White House and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which took an unseemly turn after the ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/25/journalism-in-the-war-room/ President Barack Obama has declared that "a constructive beginning" has been achieved in America's new engagement with Iran.  Speaking today following the first formal diplomatic negotiation between the Islamic Republic and the U.S. in more than a quarter century, Obama was careful to state that Iran's agreement to cooperate "fully ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/10/01/the-new-engagement/ For months, some analysts have maintained that Obama's foreign policy would essentially be a continuation of Bush's.  No longer can this be said.  Last week's decision by the Obama Administration to drop plans to deploy a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic is a final proof of a ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/09/21/security-and-symbolism/ VENICE -- The latest edition of the Venice Film Festival, at which I've been watching new American [caption id="attachment_541" align="alignright" width="300" caption="America's Road?"][/caption] films, offers a fairly depressing vision of American society -- one that the largely European audience here finds easy to accept.  It is a view of American reality as it is, was, ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/09/07/apocalypse-in-venice/ When West Berlin was an island surrounded by the German Democratic Republic, the name Kennedy was invoked by Berliners with almost religious feeling, especially after Dallas.  At the Freie Universitet, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies was named, like so many other places around the world, after ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/08/29/kennedys/ It's turning out to be a long, hot summer in the Northern Hemisphere.  No, not the dreadful sort of heatwave that Europe remembers from six years ago, when thousands of the elderly died from withering heat in their homes or at shelters or even hospitals that seemed incapable of providing ... http://election.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/08/13/mad-as-hell/