The Americas Archive

I spent the morning discussing an online multimedia project and some of the difficulties posed by technological lag in the developing world, then ran across this when I got back home. William Irwin Thomson once wrote that we imagine our societal past as a progression of discrete evolutionary stages moving from the simple to the complex, ignoring the fact that a broad range of societal complexity exists concurrently in the present. The Brazilian government ministry that organized the flyover explained that it was trying to raise awareness about the need to protect these “uncontacted” tribes. I wonder if it will […]

An investment bank economist first grouped the nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China together based on two shared characteristics: large populations and rapid economic growth. The so-called BRIC nations had little else in common — they covered the full scale of democratization, with varying degrees of financial transparency and vastly different economies. Yet after Goldman Sachs’ 2001 report that coined the acromym was released, the BRIC nations became inexorably linked, at least in the collective mind of the investment community. Last week, the BRIC nations took their union out of the realm of analyst reports and formed a political […]

WASHINGTON — In April 2003, in Baghdad, Army Specialist Garth Stewart stepped on a land mine. The blast blew off half his left leg. The next thing he knew, he was in a military hospital being prepped for the eventual fitting of a prosthesis. Today, Stewart is a poster boy for the Army’s latest generation of “intelligent” robotic limbs that move and flex like real limbs — and adapt themselves to a wearer’s unique gait. Prostheses have come a long way since the wooden peg leg, but in the future they might not be necessary at all. One military medical […]

TORREÓN, Mexico — The Mexican political class doesn’t agree on much, but no one denies that the country’s political left today is a hopeless mess. Every day brings a fresh embarrassment, a new descent into the bizarre. The present state of affairs is all the more conspicuous given the heights to which the left rose less than two short years ago. Ironically, the decline can be traced to the very man who almost lifted the left into the presidency. As 2006 dawned, everything was gangbusters for the darling of the Mexican left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The ex-mayor of Mexico […]

This is a very insightful and neglected historical analogy, and the fact that it’s made by the former head of the U.S. Special Forces Command will hopefully pre-empt any attempts to dismiss it as America-bashing. It’s become something of a conventional wisdom that the democratization of Latin America has been a net victory for American regional interests. But as Maj. Gen. Lambert points out, the fallout from the methods used to suppress and/or eradicate a generation of Marxist revolutionaries is still being felt. Gen. Lambert doesn’t mention the exacerbating factor of ambient anti-American sentiment that no amount of public diplomacy […]

On May 6, during Russian President Vladmir Putin’s last day in office, the American and Russian governments finally signed their long-sought civil nuclear energy agreement. The accord facilitates the transfer of technologies, materials, equipment and other components used to conduct nuclear research and produce nuclear power. Putin and Bush originally announced their intent to negotiate a U.S.-Russia Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation (known as a “123 Agreement”) at their joint news conference held on the sidelines of the July 2006 G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Section 123 of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act requires the United States to negotiate a […]

In March, India’s Tata Group made headlines with its $2.3 billion acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR) from Ford, the latest in a series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions in which well-known Western brands such as IBM, Barclays Bank, Tetley Tea and Corus steel have been bought, in part or entirely, by multinational corporations from developing economies. Those with a longer historical view might recall that it was private business — the British East India Company — that imposed imperial control over the “brightest jewel in the empire,” before crown rule was implemented in 1858. With Tata scooping up […]

WEST POINT, New York — It was a decades-old Army tradition that junior officers would eat lunch together every day in Army-run dining halls. There they would trade ideas they’d picked up in their training. But in the last decade, to save money, contractors such as Kellogg, Brown and Root have replaced the old dining halls with civilian-style cafeterias, some boasting big-screen TVs. The officers stopped gathering . . . and stopped talking. That had the effect of isolating young leaders, preventing them from getting answers to life-and-death questions — and from sharing their own answers they might have learned […]

On Jan. 20, 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will experience its first presidential transition. Having recently celebrated its fifth anniversary in March, the Department has operated only under the Bush administration. Last year, Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee prepared a report charging that, “One of the continuing problems [of DHS] appears to be the over politicization of the top rank of Department management.” The authors warned that, “This could lead to heightened vulnerability to terrorist attack.” Although denying the politicization charge, Paul A. Schneider, Acting DHS deputy secretary, concurred that “major terrorist attacks, both here and […]

President George W. Bush has been dismissed as a lame duck, but it appears that significant elements of the doctrine that bears his name will endure long after he leaves the White House. Although we haven't heard much about the Bush Doctrine in recent years, its impact on American foreign policy—both positive and negative—is as significant as it is misunderstood. The doctrine is generally associated with the preventive war against Iraq, but it has more than one component. The first was unveiled during Bush's address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, long before the U.S. swept […]