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"Freedom, Security, and America's Role in the World"

September 13, 2013

Summary:

On September 18, Foreign Affairs Managing Editor will join a panel of foreign policy experts at the Charles Koch Institute. They will discuss the United States' role in the world.

On September 18, the Charles Koch Institute will bring together a group of foreign policy experts to discuss the United States' role in the world. Foreign Affairs Managing Editor Jonathan Tepperman will be joined on the panel by Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky; Peter Van Buren, the former State Department official and author of We Meant Well; Chris Copyne, the F.A.

Open Source, Open World

Where Free Software Came From -- And Where It's Going

September 13, 2013

Yuri Takhteyev

Summary:

In the late 1960s, technology companies realized that they could sell the programs that they had been giving away with their computers. For software developers, though, that was a betrayal of their field's values: collaboration and sharing. Here's how the technologists have worked to bring those principles back.

In the first week of July, 7,000 people gathered in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, for the annual meeting of the International Free Software Forum. Every year since 2000, the forum has met to discuss what is commonly known as open source software -- software that individuals can use, change, and redistribute -- and is called “free software” by many of its true believers. The forum, one of the world’s largest, takes place thousands of miles away from the place where the free-software movement originally started, at American universities such as MIT and Berkeley. And that is no accident.

The Christian Exodus

The Disastrous Campaign to Rid the Middle East of Christianity

September 13, 2013

Reza Aslan

Summary:

It's tempting to think that the Middle East's rapidly dwindling Christian population is a consequence of the chaos of the Arab Spring. In reality, it's the product of a long-term campaign, one that will soon prove to be a disaster for Christians and Muslims alike.

As I write, the city of Maaloula in Syria has become a ghost town after being briefly occupied by members of the al Qaeda–linked jihadist group al-Nusra Front. Conflicting reports claim that al-Nusra fighters have desecrated churches and statues in what may be one of the oldest Christian cities in the world, a place where residents still speak Aramaic, the language presumably spoken by Jesus.

The Iran Fallacy

Seeing Damascus, Thinking Tehran

September 11, 2013

Suzanne Maloney

Summary:

In his address on Tuesday, Obama noted that failure to do something about Syria's chemical weapons would embolden Iran. That argument is superficially compelling and politically appealing. It also happens to be wrong.

Iran looms large in the debate over how to respond to the August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria that killed hundreds of civilians. For proponents of a muscular American response, strikes would be as much about deterring Iran as about punishing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “A failure to stand against the use of chemical weapons,” U.S.

Democracy, Take Two

The Maldives' Mohamed Nasheed Rises Again, And Why It Matters

September 11, 2013

Eric Randolph

Summary:

Sipping cocktails in the Maldives' secluded island resorts, one would be hard-pressed to imagine that, just last year, hard-line political Islamists helped to topple the country’s first-ever democratically elected president. As the Maldives holds its first post-coup election, it offers important lessons for other nations in transition.

Most of the million tourists who visit the Maldives every year leave without seeing even a hint of the political violence that has shaken the country over the past few years.

Nasheed, who had endured 12 arrests, torture, and six years in jail, during which he was labeled a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, took power on the tide of popular euphoria. Just four years later, though, he was swept back out to sea.

That Nasheed was even allowed to stand in the election is something of a victory for democracy activists.

Putin Scores on Syria

How He Got the Upper Hand -- And How He Will Use It

September 11, 2013

Fiona Hill

Summary:

Despite giving Obama and the United States a “get out of jail free card” at home, most observers agree that, on points, Putin is the real winner of this particular round of the Syrian conflict. The question now is whether the United States and its allies can out-maneuver Putin to regain the diplomatic advantage. If the history of the Syrian conflict is any guide, that will not be easy.

On Monday, September 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a diplomatic move that seemed to catch the entire international community, not just U.S. President Barack Obama and his team, by surprise. He seized the most dramatic moment possible -- the eve of what was to be a fateful vote in the U.S. Congress on Obama’s decision to launch a targeted strike against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad -- to propose that Syria surrender its chemical weapons to an international commission headed by the United Nations. Assad quickly agreed to the proposal, at least in principle.

Navalny's Victory in Defeat

A Losing Bid For Mayor Could Make Him King

September 10, 2013

Joshua Yaffa

Summary:

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny lost this week's Moscow mayoral election. Nonetheless, one is left with the sense that even though the Kremlin manages to land punch after punch, winning each round on points, somehow the match isn’t going its way.

You could say that Sergei Sobyanin, the acting mayor of Moscow, was both the winner and the loser of Sunday’s mayoral election in Moscow. He was pronounced victorious with 51 percent of the vote, insuring himself control for the next five years of Russia’s capital, its nearly 12 million citizens, and its $52 billion annual budget. For these reasons, plus the job’s outsized influence and profile, it is considered the most powerful elected office in the country after the presidency itself.

Will Abbott Choose China?

Australia Out to Sea

September 9, 2013

Hugh White

Summary:

Abbott models himself on his mentor and predecessor: the last Liberal prime minister, John Howard. Howard is commonly assumed to have repositioned Australia away from Asia and even closer to the United States. In reality, though, he went a long way to court Beijing, too. Abbott will try to do the same.

Australian voters were not thinking much about foreign policy when they voted last weekend to dismiss the Labor government of Kevin Rudd and install a conservative government under Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party. Instead, the election hinged on sharp domestic debates and on personality questions. Both sides tacitly agreed to ignore the huge foreign policy question that looms over the country: How should Australia position itself between its traditional ally, the United States, and its major trading partner, China, as their strategic rivalry grows?

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The statesmanlike thing would be to try to reduce the risk of escalating the U.S.-China rivalry by urging both sides to settle their differences and to agree to share power in Asia. This would be a very radical and unexpected thing for any Australian leader to do.

A Taboo Worth Protecting

Chemical Weapons Are Indiscriminate -- And That's Why They Should be Outlawed

September 9, 2013

Sohail H. Hashmi and Jon Western

Summary:

Some opponents of a strike in Syria contend that the norm against chemical weapons is pointless, since they generally produce far fewer fatalities than conventional arms. But chemical weapons, like nuclear and biological ones, are concerning primarily because they make discrimination between civilians and fighters impossible.

Among the many arguments marshaled in opposition to U.S. intervention in Syria, a prominent one is that the chemical weapons taboo is not worth saving. Writing in Foreign Affairs last April, the political scientist John Mueller suggested that the world should “erase the red line,” since chemical weapons generally produce far fewer fatalities than conventional weapons.

"Weighing War, Peace and Polls"

Managing Editor Jonathan Tepperman in The International Herald Tribune

September 9, 2013

In his latest column, Foreign Affairs Managing Editor Jonathan Tepperman looks for lessons in how past U.S. presidents have won public support for potentially risky foreign interventions. One of the most important lessons, he argues, is that "nothing succeeds like success." Obama should therefore "focus hardest on getting its policy right and fighting a successful campaign -- and trust that if it does, the American people will probably come around."

Pick Your Poison

Count on Congress

All Foreign Affairs Content

"Freedom, Security, and America's Role in the World"

Open Source, Open World

The Christian Exodus

The Iran Fallacy

Democracy, Take Two

Putin Scores on Syria

Navalny's Victory in Defeat

Will Abbott Choose China?

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A Taboo Worth Protecting

"Weighing War, Peace and Polls"