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12. No Exceptions: The Decision to Open All Military Positions to Women
- Author:
- Ash Carter
- Publication Date:
- 12-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- As Secretary of Defense, I devoted a large amount of my time to visiting our troops at bases around the world. These were my favorite trips because they gave me the opportunity to spend time with the most important, dynamic, and inspiring part of the United States Armed Forces: our people In June 2016, I visited Fort Knox on one of these trips, where I met with Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets and observed their training. These were college students training to be commissioned officers. Meeting with them, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride. Any American who had the chance to look these young women and men in the eye would be proud to observe how dedicated, disciplined, talented, and principled they are. And to know what they are doing for all Americans—to protect us and make a better world for our children—makes you even prouder.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
13. Governance of Highly Decentralized Nonstate Actors: the Case of Solar Geoengineering
- Author:
- Jesse Reynolds and Gernot Wagner
- Publication Date:
- 11-2018
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- New technologies, such as social media and do-it-yourself biotechnology, alter the capacities and incentives of both state and nonstate actors. This can include enabling direct decentralized interventions, in turn altering actors’ power relations. The provision of global public goods, widely regarded as states’ domain, so far has eluded such powerful technological disruptions. We here introduce the idea of highly decentralized solar geoengineering, plausibly done in form of small high-altitude balloons. While solar geoengineering has the potential to greatly reduce climate change, it has generally been conceived as centralized and state deployed. Potential highly decentralized deployment moves the activity from the already contested arena of state action to that of environmentally motivated nongovernmental organizations and individuals, which could disrupt international relations and pose novel challenges for technology and environmental policy. We explore its feasibility, political implications, and governance.
- Topic:
- Climate Change and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
14. From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: Dollar Exposures in Chinese Fintech
- Author:
- Michael B Greenwald
- Publication Date:
- 12-2018
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- In the post-9/11 era, Washington has waged innovative campaigns against terrorism finance, sanctions evasion, and money laundering. Leveraging America’s heavyweight status in the international financial system, the United States Treasury has isolated and bankrupted rogue regimes, global terrorists, and their enablers. As financial technology transforms global business, the traditional financial system faces new competition across a suite of offerings, ranging from brokerage services to peer to peer lending. In no area is this clearer than in mobile payments, where a global hegemon lies ready to exercise its weight, and it is not the United States
- Topic:
- International Relations, International Affairs, and Financial Markets
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
15. The China Tariff Mess
- Author:
- Martin S. Feldstein
- Publication Date:
- 09-2018
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- The cost to US consumers and firms imposed by tariffs on Chinese imports is not large relative to the gain that would be achieved if the US succeeds in persuading China to stop illegally taking US firms’ technology. But the Trump administration should state that this is the goal, and that the tariffs will be removed when it is met.
- Topic:
- International Cooperation, International Political Economy, and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
16. Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook
- Author:
- Belfer Center
- Publication Date:
- 11-2017
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- People join campaigns for different reasons: electing a leader they believe in, advancing an agenda, cleaning up government, or experiencing the rush and adrenaline of campaign life. These are some of the reasons we got involved in politics. We certainly didn’t sign up because we wanted to become cyber experts and we’re guessing you didn’t either
- Topic:
- International Affairs and Cybersecurity
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
17. Linking Heterogeneous Climate Policies (Consistent with the Paris Agreement)
- Author:
- Michael A Mehling, Gilbert E. Metcalf, and Robert Stavins
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- The Paris Agreement has achieved one of two key necessary conditions for ultimate success—a broad base of participation among the countries of the world. But another key necessary condition has yet to be achieved—adequate collective ambition of the individual nationally determined contributions. How can climate negotiators provide a structure that will include incentives to increase ambition over time? An important part of the answer can be international linkage of regional, national, and sub-national policies—that is, formal recognition of emission reductions undertaken in another jurisdiction for the purpose of meeting a Party’s own mitigation objectives. A central challenge is how to facilitate such linkage in the context of the very great heterogeneity that characterizes climate policies along five dimensions: type of policy instrument; level of government jurisdiction; status of that jurisdiction under the Paris Agreement; nature of the policy instrument’s target; and the nature, along several dimensions, of each Party’s Nationally Determined Contribution. We consider such heterogeneity among policies, and identify which linkages of various combinations of characteristics are feasible; of these, which are most promising; and what accounting mechanisms would make the operation of respective linkages consistent with the Paris Agreement.
- Topic:
- Climate Change and International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
18. Take the Money and Run
- Author:
- Jacqueline L. Hazelton
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- How can the United States best assure its interests abroad when a partner state faces an insurgency? The question has vexed policymakers, military officers, and scholars throughout the Cold War and into the post–9/11 era. When the United States finds its military might turned against itself by insurgents, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, thoughts often turn to the small U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. The Salvadoran government defended itself against Marxist-nationalist-liberal-socialist rebels in a civil war that ended in a peace deal. The small-footprint U.S. intervention is appealing as an alternative to the tens of thousands of troops deployed in bigger quagmires. Conventional wisdom says that the brutal, repressive Salvadoran government instituted liberalizing, democratizing reforms to defeat the insurgency. Analysis of contemporaneous documents and interviews with participants, however, reveals that the campaign is a poor model for future U.S. interventions, for three reasons. First, the government retained power by waging a war of terrorism and attrition against insurgents and civilians alike. Second, Salvadoran elites resisted U.S. pressure for reforms. Third, chance rather than U.S. choices played a significant role in the war's outcome, meaning that replication of the pattern of events is unlikely.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- America
19. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement in the Arab Winter
- Author:
- Stig Jarle Hansen, Mohamed Husein Gaas, and Ida Bary
- Publication Date:
- 09-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Although it may seem that the Muslim Brotherhood has weakened since the onset of the "Arab Winter" in 2013 and onward, organizations with their origins in the Brotherhood still have access to power in countries as diverse as Somalia, Bahrain, Morocco, and Yemen, and might regain power in other countries as well. Most Brotherhood-affiliated movements are committed to some form of democracy, unlike many of their rivals in the Middle East. Even the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have sought allies among Brotherhood affiliates, despite banning a majority of affiliated organizations.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Middle East
20. A Lasting Defeat: The Campaign to Destroy ISIS
- Author:
- Ash Carter
- Publication Date:
- 10-2017
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- On December 11, 2016, just before my time as Secretary of Defense would end, I stepped off a C-130 transport plane onto a cold and dusty patch of northern Iraq that had been on my mind for more than a year: an Iraqi military airfield called Qayyarah West. Q-West, as it was known to the American military, was a talisman of progress on one of the defining issues of my time as secretary, the fight to defeat ISIS. A year before, General Joe Dunford and I had briefed the President on a plan to energize the counter-ISIS fight. We had laid out a series of military tasks, in Iraq and Syria, that would lead us to the liberation of ISIS’ strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria. Q-West was a fulcrum of that plan. Ejecting ISIS and turning the airstrip into a logistics hub was essential to seizing Mosul, just 40 miles to the north.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
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