Column Archive

ABOARD USS DONALD COOK — It was a rare moment of excitement on a long, tedious counter-piracy patrol. On the evening of Sept. 24, lookouts on the USS Donald Cook, a Virginia-based destroyer assigned to a NATO flotilla in the Gulf of Aden, spotted a mysterious shape on the horizon. The distant vessel did not respond to Donald Cook’s hails as it loomed closer. With the cry, “Ship of interest,” crew members summoned Donald Cook’s captain, Derek Granger. Interrupted during a rare bit of down-time, Granger climbed to the bridge wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Lighting his customary cigar, he […]

At their Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva, representatives from Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany) appeared to make considerable progress. The Iranian government representative agreed to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its recently revealed second, secret uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qum. Iran also expressed interest “in principle” in sending its stockpiles of low enriched uranium to Russia and France for further enrichment and conversion into fuel rods for an experimental reactor used for medical purposes. Russia’s role in helping secure these developments remains unclear. Russian leaders […]

As someone who thinks systematically about the future for a living, I frequently read science fiction with an eye for what it reveals about how today’s real fears are being projected upon tomorrow’s imagined landscapes. The books behind the 1973 movie “Soylent Green” (too many people!) and the 2006 movie “Children of Men” (no more babies!) make for a good example. Compare their central premises and you’ve basically captured the 180-degree turn the popular imagination has experienced on population growth over my lifetime. So what does today’s science fiction tell me? We have a lot of fears about biological technology […]

Not long after the so-called “civilian surge” was announced as part of the troop buildup in Afghanistan, a veteran State Department foreign service officer I spoke with posed a simple question: “Where are they going to come from?” He had recently returned from a year serving on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan and was grappling with the lack of civilian expertise that he said was so desperately needed for the state-building tasks there. “Is the new Secretary of Agriculture going to volunteer staff? The Secretary of the Treasury?” He suspected not. The diplomat’s insights get at a central challenge […]

JERUSALEM — The latest developments surrounding Iran and its nuclear program would seem, on the surface, to provide Israel with reasons for even deeper worries about the threat from the Islamic Republic. After all, the revelation that Iran secretly built a second uranium enrichment plant in the mountains near the holy city of Qom offers more evidence supporting the Israelis’ belief that Tehran aims to build nuclear weapons. The subsequent launches of Iranian missiles capable of striking Israel also highlighted the Jewish state’s potential vulnerability to an Iranian attack. And yet, the feverish pace of events and the international reaction […]