The Intervention Dilemma
When should states intervene militarily to stop atrocities in other countries? The question is an old and well-traveled one. Indeed, it is now visiting Syria.
(Project Syndicate, June 8, 2012)
Source: project-syndicate.org
Power Shifts
As Americans wrestle with the implications of revolutions in the Middle East as well as the rise of China in Asia, we need a better understanding of what it means to have power in world politics. Traditionally, the mark of a great power was its ability to prevail in war. But in an information age, success depends not just on whose army wins but also on whose story wins.
(TIME, May 9, 2011)
Source: TIME
Gaddafi and Change
David Warsh, generally a respected journalist, has just published in the Providence Journal an attack on Michael Porter of Harvard Business School for consulting with Gaddafi about change in Libya in the period after Gaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program and his overt support for terrorism. Porter, a founder of the Monitor Consulting Group, developed a plan to promote change in Libya. He hired a number of Western intellectuals to help by going to Libya to promote new ideas.
(Huffington Post, March 31, 2011)
Source: The Huffington Post
China's Repression Undoes Its Charm Offensive
I was asked to lecture at Beijing University on soft power, the ability to use attraction and persuasion to get what you want without force or payment. This was before the series of revolutions roiling the Middle East, in whose aftermath China is clamping down on the Internet and jailing human rights lawyers, once again torpedoing its soft power campaign. The auditorium that day was packed, and I had been told that more than a thousand articles have been published in China on this topic. That may have something to do with the fact that in 2007, President Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power.
(Washington Post, March 25, 2011)
Source: Washington Post
Qaddafi and Soft Power: A Response by Joe Nye
In view of the criticism by Martin Peretz of The New Republic and in Mother Jones magazine of my meeting in 2007 with Muammar Qaddafi and my subsequent article in The New Republic, let me try to clarify what actually happened.
(Power & Policy, March 7, 2011)
Source: powerandpolicy.com
New World Order
Beyond the euphoria and uncertainties of the moment, the revolt in Egypt has sparked a debate about how much technology and information matter in a revolutionary context. Some commentators, particularly in TV coverage, have claimed that Twitter, Facebook, and blogs largely drove events in Egypt. This has provoked a strong intellectual backlash—an argument that more traditional forces are what truly deserve credit, from Bouazizi’s suicide in Tunisia to the economic woes of the middle class in Egypt.
(The New Republic, February 18, 2011)
Source: tnr.com
The Future of Power
The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren’t fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government’s dealings with the region.
(Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, February 16, 2011)
Source: amacad.org
