International Relations Blog

One bullseye cannot rescue Obama’s record

By Gideon Rachman

“Weak.” “Apologist.” Those two words are repeated endlessly in the Republican party’s attack on Barack Obama, as it tries to persuade voters that the US president is not worthy of another term as commander-in-chief.

The charge of weakness will be difficult to make stick. As the president’s team will endlessly remind us, he is the man who sent in a combat team to kill Osama bin Laden – against the advice of some of his aides – and who has ruthlessly pounded al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan with drone strikes.

The irony is that there are really serious criticisms that can be made of Mr Obama’s handling of foreign affairs. But the real problem is not that he is weak or apologises for the US. It is that he has over-promised and under-delivered. Fortunately for the president, this is a relatively complicated idea that relies on some knowledge of world affairs. Therefore it is not a critique that the Republicans are likely to attempt.

Nonetheless, it is sobering to measure Mr Obama against the goals he set himself. His international priorities in 2008 were clear and ambitious. He intended to solve the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy. He wanted to make peace between Israel and Palestine. He would transform America’s image in the Muslim world. The Guantánamo prison camp would close and terrorists would be tried in US courts. The new president would get the US out of Iraq and use the freed-up resources to fix Afghanistan. And he would dramatically improve relations with Russia and China, allowing the world to make progress on issues of common concern, from global warming to global trade.

Go down this checklist and you will notice far more failures than successes. The rapprochement with Iran never happened. Instead, as Mr Obama nears the end of his first term, the US and Iran are dangerously close to armed conflict. The president’s efforts to revive the Middle East peace process have got nowhere. Guantánamo has not closed and the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is taking place there. Read more…

As published in www.ft.com on May 14, 2012.

The End of Another Semester

I had an incredible time last weekend in Barcelona. I did a lot: I went to Parque Guell, La Sagrada Familia, the beach, the park, and out to eat several times. I enjoyed every second of it!

I am, however, a little behind since I didn´t work over the weekend and so I spent the past week working to catch up. We only have 2 more weeks in the semester; thus, we are experiencing a busy time with school work.

And in addition to school, applying for jobs is also quite time/energy consuming. Certainly, because of the economic situation, it is not the best time to graduate and to look for a job; but I am confident that there is a fit for me somewhere in some company.

Amid growing risk of a Greek exit, the euro zone has yet to face up to the task of saving the single currency itself

The respite in the euro crisis lasted a few short months. Now, despite a €130 billion ($169 billion) second bail-out for Greece, a fiscal compact agreed on by the euro-zone leaders in December, and €1 trillion of cheap long-term loans from the European Central Bank, the night terrors are back. How dispiriting that Europe is still so ill-prepared for the ordeal to come.

Time is short. In France voters have given their new president, François Hollande, a mandate to alter the “austere” course set by his ousted predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and to focus on growth. Mrs Merkel says she will not change the fiscal compact, but Mr Hollande needs something to show voters in legislative polls next month. More threatening is the second election looming in Greece, where parties are struggling to form a government. If a majority of Greeks again vote to reject the spending cuts and reforms that go with their country’s bail-out, then euro-zone governments—in particular, Germany’s—will face a drastic choice. Mrs Merkel will either accommodate Greece and swallow the moral hazard of rewarding defiance or, more likely, stand firm and cut the Greeks adrift (see article).

The idea of a chaotic Greek departure from the euro at a time of Franco-German disunion should terrify everyone it touches (the damage it would do the world economy may well be the biggest risk to Barack Obama’s chances of re-election, for instance). With so much at stake, the rest of the euro zone urgently needs to lower the risk that contagion from a Greek exit would infect Portugal, Ireland and even Spain and Italy. The worry is that, just at the moment when hardheaded realpolitik is needed, politics has fallen prey to self-delusion, with leaders in all the main countries peddling seductive half-truths that promise Europe’s citizens an easier way out.

Stories that people tell…

The euro zone needs to do a lot of hard things. Our list would include at the very least: in the short term, slower fiscal adjustment, more investment, looser monetary policy to promote growth and a thicker financial firewall to protect the weaklings on the periphery from contagion (all of which the Germans dislike); in the medium term, structural reforms to Europe’s rigid markets and outsize welfare states (not popular in southern Europe), coupled with a plan to mutualise at least some of the outstanding debt and to set up a Europe-wide bank-resolution mechanism (a tricky idea for everyone). It is an ambitious agenda, but earlier this year, with the Italians, Spanish and Greeks all making some hard choices and ECB money flushing through, the politics seemed possible.

As published in www.economist.com (from the print edition) on May 12, 2012.

April 2012

Mr. Hervé Crès, Provisional Administrator of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Mr. Santiago Iñiguez, President of IE University have recently signed an exchange agreement that will promote academic excellence and foster cross-cultural understanding between the two institutions.

The exchange will take place between students of IE’s Master in International Relations, International MBA and Master of Finance and Sciences Po’s Master Programs.

The Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris is the second academic institution, after St Gallen University, to create formal collaborative ties with IE’s Master in International Relations this Spring.

“Exchange programs build bridges between universities and create opportunities for students to learn from their host institutions peers and professors. This can only be a mutually beneficial experience for all”, said IE School of Arts and Humanities Dean Arantza de Areilza.

By Martin Wolf

The elections in France and Greece tell us that austerity fatigue has set in. This is not surprising. For many countries no plausible exit exists from depression, deflation and despair. If the currency union were a normal fixed exchange rate arrangement, it would collapse, as did the gold standard in the 1930s and the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s. The question is whether the fact that it is a monetary union will do more than delay that outcome. The last chance of bringing needed change rests on the shoulders of François Hollande, the newly elected president of France. Mr Hollande says his mission is to give Europe “a dimension of growth and prosperity”. So can he achieve this laudable aim?

Fiscal tightening does not improve outcomes in shrinking economies. Thus, austerity is merely begetting more austerity. According to the International Monetary Fund, the ratio of gross public debt to gross domestic product will rise, not fall, in every year from 2008 to 2013 in Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It will briefly fall in Greece, but only because of its debt restructuring.

The most frightening data are for unemployment (see chart). The proportion of young people between the ages of 15 and 25 who are now without a job is 51 per cent in Greece and Spain, 36 per cent in Portugal and Italy and 30 per cent in Ireland. France is in better shape, but even there the picture is dire, with one in five young people out of work. Is it plausible that people will put up with this indefinitely? No. Far more likely is a repetition of the protest votes we have seen in these elections. Nicolas Sarkozy was the eighth leader of a eurozone member country to have been swept from office in little over a year.

Economic prospects are poor. The IMF forecasts that the economy will shrink this year, in real terms, in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain and grow by just 0.5 per cent in Ireland. Growth is forecast, optimistically, at close to zero in the first four countries in 2013. This is politically perilous. The emergence of still more extremist parties and a rising sense of betrayal seems inevitable. It is also economically dangerous: how many of the brightest young people are now seeking to emigrate?

Something must change. Yet all routes seem blocked. Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president, has argued in the Financial Times that monetary policy has reached, if not exceeded, its limits. The fiscal compact is designed to preclude discretionary fiscal policy. Anyway, in the absence of fiscal solidarity, member countries that face unsustainably high interest rates have no room for manoeuvre, while the currency union lacks a federal fiscal actor. Read more…

As published in www.ft.com on May 8, 2012.