Lee Feinstein, David Dreier, Lee Hamilton, and Adrian Karatnycky
Publication Date:
10-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Enhanced American leadership at the United Nations is beneficial for U.S. interests and can help strengthen the UN and the international system. For many years, however, the United States has not been nearly as effective at the UN as it can or should be.
Topic:
Government, International Cooperation, and United Nations
A consensus is emerging, made far more urgent by the war on terrorism, that U.S. public diplomacy requires new thinking and decision-making structures that do not now exist. We must make clear why we are fighting this war and why supporting it is in the interest of other nations as well as our own. Because terrorism is considered the transcendent threat to our national security, it is overwhelmingly in the national interest that the United States formulate and manage its foreign policies in such a way that the war on terrorism receives the indispensable cooperation of foreign nations.
Topic:
Security, Foreign Policy, and International Cooperation
Corporate governance—the rules that govern the relationship between managers and shareholders—belongs on the foreign policy agenda of American decision-makers. The vigorous debates underway about corporate governance, both at home and abroad, present an opportunity for the United States to advance its foreign policy goals of enhancing free trade and financial stability.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Economics, Government, Industrial Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Controversy, even fear, of new foods is not new. The tomato was widely regarded as poisonous in the United States and northern Europe as late as the 1830s, due to its relationship to the night-shade family of plants. There was such concern that in 1820, the state of New York banned their consumption. Tomatoes even had their own “Frankenfood” label: “wolf 's peaches.”
Topic:
Development, Environment, and Science and Technology
Passed in November 2001, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1377 notes the importance of regional organizations such as OSCE in fighting and preventing terrorism – including promoting best practices and assisting with implementation of resolution 1373, the comprehensive anti-terrorism document passed in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the United States.
Topic:
International Cooperation, Regional Cooperation, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States, Bosnia, Herzegovina, United Nations, and Balkans
Somewhere, at this very moment under one of the world's oceans, there is a Royal Navy 'Vanguard' class nuclear powered and armed submarine (SSBN) on patrol. Before it returns to port, another one of the four Vanguard class boats will head out into the deep ocean, meaning that no matter what occurs, Britain will always have an unreachable nuclear counter-strike facility. That one submarine, always out at sea and submerged, is now Britain's whole nuclear deterrent; all other nuclear weapons that Britain held during the Cold War, both land based and air-launched, have been decommissioned and dismantled over the last decade. The UK has the smallest nuclear arsenal of all the five nuclear-armed permanent members of the UN Security Council (it is even believed that Israel – undeclared as a nuclear power – now actually possesses more warheads than the UK does). The number of warheads quoted by the Ministry of Defence is now “fewer than 200”, and estimated by independent sources as likely to be around 160.
Topic:
Defense Policy and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Britain, United States, United Kingdom, and Europe
This article compares the regulation of asbestos, the regulatory impact of the health crisis associated with AIDS and the regulation of genetically modified agricultural products in the United States and France. These cases trace the evolution of health, safety and environmental politics and polices in the two countries over the last three decades. In general, risk management policies have become more politicized and risk averse in the United States while they have become more politicized and risk averse in France. In many respects, regulatory politics and policies in France during the 1990s resemble those of the US during the 1960s and 70s.
There are significant differences between the way academics in France and the United States see postcolonial processes, differences having to do with particular national histories. It is, however, precisely the task of academics to work to transcend such specificities. So the differences must have to do with collective intellectual movements in the two countries, and it would perhaps be useful to compare them.
Unlike in the United States, in France, the main operational criterion for identifying the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies is not race or gender, but geographical location. In this respect, the first affirmative action plan recently designed in the sphere of higher education by one of France's most famous 'grandes écoles', the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, while not departing significantly from this broader pattern of redistributive, territory-based public policies, has given rise to a controversy of an unprecedented scale, some features of which may actually suggest the existence of a deeper similarity between French and American affirmative action programs and the difficulties that they face. That similarity lies in the attempts made by the supporters of such programs to systematically minimize the negative side-effects on their beneficiaries' public image potentially induced by the visibility of the policy itself.
This article addresses the racial thought behind French immigration and colonial policy in the heyday of imperialism. Albert Sarraut and several other likeminded officials articulated a singularly contradictory view of human difference. They viewed colonial immigrants as an exotic menace, and looked with approval to the writings of racist thinkers in the United States, like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. At the same time, however, Sarraut and his colleagues considered North African immigration, in particular, as vital to France's future well-being; French policy-makers were more optimistic than the Americans that colonial migrants could be "civilized" within decades, or perhaps a few generations. This latter view encouraged them in their commitment to the Republic's civilizing mission and their belief that turning immigrants into Frenchmen was a practical and realistic necessity.