Russia’s invasion of Georgia looks like it might be played out, finally. War kills a lot of people for no particularly good reason, and this one is no different. Russia is certainly playing the role of the bad guy in this conflict, as well they should. Georgia may have violated an old agreement not to disarm South Ossetia, but Russia’s response has been unnecessarily harsh. Besides, sovereignty–the old notion that states get to govern their own people and police their own borders–is much too established a notion for the world to buy Russia’s argument that Georgia is just getting what they deserve.
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Aug 122008
May 312007
President Bush is struggling to find an acceptable compromise position on global warming. For years, he has said that the time wasn’t right to act on global warming. He rejected the Kyoto Protocol, dismissed setting benchmarks for carbon dioxide emissions, and repeatedly claimed that the issue needed further study. Lately, he’s been trying to moderate that stance somewhat, due to pressures from either Tony Blair, the Supreme Court, the new Democratic Congress, or some combination thereof. So, while he continues to reject the Kyoto Protocol, and has dismissed outright the recent ambitious German proposal, he has started to show some signs of progress. He has taken preliminary steps towards increasing regulations on automobile manufacturers, and just today he has proposed a new round of international talks, which must include China and India. The stipulation that China and India be included is important for two reasons. First, it addresses the common conservative complaint with the Kyoto Protocol, that it failed to hold those two polluters to the same standard that it holds the United States, thereby creating a competitive imbalance. Second, it reduces the probability that these talks will be successful to almost nothing.
China and India have long held that it would be unfair to hold them to the same standard as Europe and the United States. After all, they are still incredibly poor countries, measured per capita, who are struggling to modernize and industrialize any way they possibly can. They claim that they cannot afford to even potentially stifle new industries by holding them to strict environmental restrictions. Furthermore, they note that the United States and the European powers had no such restrictions when we were developing economically back in the eighteen hundreds; in fact, we all notoriously stripped our countries of countless environmental resources in our quest for wealth. China and India claim that it is completely unfair to hold them to that standard. The counter argument is that we didn’t know any better at the time, whereas the newly developing states do. Furthermore, American and European workers are already at a competitive disadvantage to Chinese and Indian workers when it comes to the drastic wage differentials; forcing us to conform to significantly more restrictive environmental policies will only exacerbate the problem.
Sep 192006
Would people stop with the Clash of Civilizations arguments already?
The controversial comments by the pope have elicited another round of comments that the globe is headed towards such a monumental event. Google News counts over 1000 articles using that phrase in the last month. There is an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times about the Clash of Civilizations and the Washington Post has used the phrase five times in the past two days. The phrase even made an appearance in President Bush’s 9/11 speech, although to be fair, he wasn’t so much agreeing with it as contorting it beyond all meaning. (“This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. “)
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Aug 222006
I wish someone would tell the Bush Administration that whining doesn’t make good foreign policy. The latest incident, once again, has to do with the French. The Bush Administration had hoped that France would send a couple thousand peacekeeping troops to Lebanon to enforce the ceasefire. Instead, they pledged 200, which immediately caused the Bush Administration and other rightest Francophobes in the United States to, once again, question France’s commitment to being our ally.
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