Along the lines of the post I did yesterday about the value of exchange programs in public diplomacy, Melinda Brouwer of the FPA’s U.S. Diplomacy blog runs through the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy‘s list of ten ways for private citizens to engage the world on behalf of America. Not surprisingly, student, cultural and guest exchanges figure prominently. Good stuff, and worth remembering that private individuals can make a difference.
John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell make a solid case over at the National Interest for the argument that Francis Ford Coppola, in addition to being a filmmaking giant, was also a foreign policy visionary. Their reading of the Godfather as a prescription for American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era is pretty convincing, and definitely the most creative foreign policy analysis I’ve come across in a long time. It’s too good to spoil it with a takeaway, so just click through and read it for yourself.
Nir Rosen’s got a lengthy post over at the Washington Note that takes aim at the gathering narrative framework for Iran’s involvement in Iraq. Rosen is an extremely sharp, Arab-speaking observer who has spent most of the past five years in Iraq, and the piece comes with the imprimatur of Steve Clemon’s site. His arguments about both American policy in Iraq and our broader regional strategy are both provocative and thought-provoking, even if I suspect they are ultimately unlikely to significantly move the lines of debate for being so far outside the common wisdom. That’s not to say he’s wrong. […]
It looks like the summit meeting of EU foreign minsiters was something of a mixed bag for Russia-EU relations. On the one hand, Lithuania blocked a memorandum calling for the negotiation of a new cooperation agreement to replace the current one, which dates back to 1994. Its unmet demands ranged from the purely bilateral (repairing an oil pipeline to a Lithuanian refinery) to the more generalized trade-off variety that I’ll probably soon regret having declared obsolete (a commitment to peacefully resolve the frozen conflicts in Georgia and other former USSR territories). Moscow Times has a good overview here, and Kommersant […]
The rising tensions between Russia and Georgia, which I used yesterday to develop an abstract argument, are pretty alarming in more concrete ways. It’s easy enough to fall into the lethargic habit of saying, “Sure, there’s been a bit of sabre-rattling here, a downed drone there, but nobody’s going to actually go to war over this thing.” But as Richard Weitz makes clear in his latest WPR piece, we’ve actually got the makings of a hot conflict on our hands. Weitz concludes by advocating a global approach towards Russia: Instead, Russian-Georgian differences need to be managed within a wider context […]