North America Archive

Making a choice among great works of art is, no doubt, a fool’s errand. And yet, this weekend billions of us will turn our eyes to the unofficially anointed top competition for the best films in the world, Hollywood’s Academy Awards, better known by their anthropomorphic name: the Oscars. In honor of this weekend’s awards event, I decided to take a look through the history of cinema, in search of the best films on world politics. A fool’s errand it was, trying to narrow down a long history of moviemaking into just a dozen great movies. But I persevered. The […]

A U.S. warship prowling the Pacific Ocean has officially ushered in the Missile Defense Age, firing an SM-3 missile-killing rocket to destroy a satellite tumbling toward Earth. “The intercept occurred, and we’re very confident we hit the satellite,” Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calmly reported. Like the Rocket Age, which terrified Americans when Sputnik orbited the globe and then transfixed the world when Armstrong took his giant leap on the lunar surface; like the Jet Age, which turned the skies over Korea into a killing field and then opened the way to inexpensive, high-speed […]

Under normal circumstances, it’s nearly impossible to get countries to restrict the use of widely available weapons that are seen as militarily advantageous. At the moment, however, two groups of countries are competing to sharply cut back on one type armament that humanitarian groups claim pose a particular danger to civilians in war zones: cluster munitions. Cluster munitions are bombs, rockets, and artillery shells that disperse smaller submunitions over broad areas. These grenades or bomblets, sometimes numbering as many as 600 submunitions from a single munition, can fail to detonate immediately yet maim or kill if disturbed later. Officials of […]

MIAMI — A post-Fidel Castro Cuba, led by Fidel’s younger brother Raúl, appears poised to open itself up to limited foreign investment under the close supervision of the communist island’s military, which controls much of the economy, according to experts. The island nation’s energy resources hold particular economic potential. During the last 19 months, in which Raúl Castro has acted as Cuba’s “interim leader,” little has changed for average Cubans, who continue to face shortages of food and basic necessities. However, the 76-year-old brother of Cuba’s long-time “Commandante” has sought new deals with resort developers from Canada and Europe in […]

I didn’t find much to disagree with in Dan Drezner’s Newsweek corrective reminding folks that reports of America’s demise have been greatly exagerrated. Drezner concurs that in relative terms, America is certainly in decline. Part of that is the short term effects of the Bush administration’s various misadventures, and part of it due to the rapid rise of what Parag Khanna calls the Second World (and what others refer to as the BRIC’s: Brazil, Russia, India and China). Drezner makes some good points about the resilience of American markets, as well as the structural realities that make them the global […]

Reuters reports on the Pentagon’s announcementthat it successfully intercepted a failing spy satellite last night.There’s no confirmation on whether its toxic fuel tank was destroyed,although an explosion upon the intercepting missile’s impact indicatesthat it was. Also no word yet on the eventual groundfall of thematerial debris. Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman has got a great rundown of the technical challengesof the operation, including the eyebrow-raising tidbit that the finalcommand for the intercept launch was given by Bob Gates himself. Talkabout a high-voltage video gaming experience. WPR has been all over this story, with a solid piece on the diplomatic context of […]

The Pentagon’s decision to shoot down a failing U.S. spy satellite has prompted speculation about why the orbiter must intentionally be destroyed and has reignited debate regarding the military and diplomatic implications of using weapons in space. Last week, Pentagon officials said that a three-ship convoy just north of the Hawaiian Islands would track the satellite and shoot it down in the next two weeks using a modified SM-3 missile fired from an Aegis cruiser. The satellite, launched just over a year ago, experienced a technical failure almost immediately after reaching space and is currently circling in a low orbit, […]

WHOSE BBC? — The present author well remembers a discussion that took place in a London home in 2005. The topic was bias in the British media and whether it could not perhaps affect the British public’s perception of international matters such as the Iraq War or the Middle East conflict. The conversation had already become somewhat heated when my host — a longtime Labor Party activist and advisor to the British government — suddenly exclaimed: “We have our BBC!” The objectivity of “our” BBC being apparently beyond doubt and my interlocutor, in a similarly proprietary spirit, having only shortly […]

Many of us can recall when it was hazardous for tourists to drink tap water in much of Europe. Although times have changed and most Europeans (and tourists) now take clean drinking water for granted, an estimated 120 million people — one person in seven — on the continent do not have access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, according to a recent analysis by the United Nations Economic Commission on Europe (UNECE). This makes them vulnerable to water-related infections, such as cholera, dysentery, E. coli, viral hepatitis A and typhoid. To remedy this situation, UNECE produced the 1999 […]

The disintegration of historic American alliances, particularly U.S.-Europe relations in the wake of the Iraq war, has been much analyzed in recent years. But the untold story of U.S. alliance disintegration is the Asia-Pacific region, where America’s strategic preoccupation in Iraq and China’s rapid ascension are gradually altering and degrading America’s influence. Unfortunately, the U.S.-South Korea (ROK) alliance has followed this trend. Over the past five years, President Bush and South Korea President Roh Moo-hyun have together undermined bilateral cooperation. To be fair, the Bush administration has made major overtures to South Korea, including transferring control of wartime operations from […]