Archive for the ‘International Law & Organizations’ Category

18
Jun

Two Great Powers, No Real Leadership

Written on June 18, 2013 by Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta in Americas, Europe, Foreign Policy, Globalization & International Trade, International Law & Organizations, Political Economy

America is the world’s No. 1 and Germany is Europe’s, yet both seem content to punch below their weights.

By Josef Joffe

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When U.S. President Barack Obama pays his respects to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin this week, he will encounter a Germany that no sitting American president has encountered in many decades. No, not the “Fourth Reich” of punditry’s fevered imagination. For the first time since Harry Truman arrived in Potsdam in 1945 to dismember the Third Reich, Germany is Europe’s No. 1 again.

The irony couldn’t be thicker. Twice in the 20th century, Germany tried to grab hegemony by bayonet and blitzkrieg, almost destroying itself and Europe in the process. Now, primacy has dropped into Mrs. Merkel’s lap like an overripe plum. It’s dominion by default, and power sits uneasily on the chancellor’s head. It is literally an embarrassment of riches. Germany is so strong because Britain, France, Italy and Spain are so weak, their economies the victims of failed modernization and failing competitiveness.

Barack Obama will spend 22 hours in a country that is all dressed up but doesn’t know where to go. The U.S. and Germany are the last heavies standing in the West, but they would rather compete in the middleweight league. To invert Maggie Thatcher: They are punching below their weight. America is No. 1 in the world, and Germany is No. 1 in Europe, yet both are practicing what great powers have never done. Call it “self-containment,” or to use the language of the 19th century: They are balancing not against others, but against themselves. This is a first in great-power history.

Mr. Obama’s America is disarming and retracting, both from Europe, where there are only 30,000 U.S. soldiers left, and from the Greater Middle East, where the U.S. has vacated Iraq while pulling out from Afghanistan. In Syria, it has taken Mr. Obama two long years to figure out that he can’t play Ferdinand the Bull while Russia and Iran are playing power politics. Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, has mobilized thousands to defend the Assad regime, and the Russians have deployed naval units to the Eastern Mediterranean and dispatched sophisticated anti-air and anti-ship missiles—classic 19th century stuff. Read more…

Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit and fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

As published by The Wall Street Journal on June 17, 2013.

10
Jun

Should We Let the Terrorists Tweet?

Written on June 10, 2013 by Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta in Foreign Policy, Globalization & International Trade, International Conflict, Terrorism & Security, International Law & Organizations

How Dangerous Is a Terrorist with a Twitter Handle? There’s an effort afoot in Congress to kick terrorists off Twitter. But the government’s spies aren’t so sure.

BY JONATHAN SCHANZER

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Sensational reports in the Guardian and Washington Post recently blew the lid off of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) electronic surveillance efforts, which have harvested everything from phone calls to Facebook posts for intelligence purposes.

Curiously, Twitter still appears outside the grasp of the NSA’s PRISM program, which gathers information from major U.S. Internet companies. But a group of lawmakers are concerned that the popular microblogging service has become too hospitable an environment for terrorist groups. The platform hosts a number of official feeds for terrorist groups, including Somalia’s al-Shabab, the North African al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusra, the Taliban, and Hamas.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), who currently serves as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, is looking to curtail terrorist activity on Twitter. Poe is mindful of free speech concerns, but believes terrorist organizations are not entitled to the same free speech protections. As he argued last year, after watching Hamas use the platform for propaganda purposes during its November war with Israel, “Twitter must recognize sooner rather than later that social media is a tool for the terrorists.”

First Amendment activists will almost certainly cry foul. But they will not be alone: This would be one of their rare moments of harmony with the U.S. intelligence community, which has used Twitter feeds of extremists to monitor their messaging for strategies, tactics, and policies. America’s spies also monitor the feeds of extremist personalities and groups to see who follows them and who sympathizes with them, with the goal of identifying potential security threats at home or abroad. In fact, Twitter has made it possible for official bodies to interact with a banned group — even if those interactions haven’t been pleasant.

So while there is no evidence as of yet Twitter has been mined by PRISM — other classified programs may exist, of course — the intelligence community exploits it in other important ways. One former official at the National Security Agency notes, “Twitter is an incredible source to learn what these groups are doing. The FBI, CIA, and NSA not only get a lot of intelligence from Twitter, but there is also a lot of manipulation going on.” Read more…

Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism intelligence analyst at the U.S. Treasury, is vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

As published in www.foreignpolicy.com on June 8, 2013.

7
Jun

Nations are chasing the illusion of sovereignty

Written on June 7, 2013 by Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta in Foreign Policy, International Conflict, Terrorism & Security, International Law & Organizations

By Philip Stephens

The concept of freedom to act is as compelling as it is unrealistic

cd9b2573-711f-460a-a41c-857b303055d4.imgThe state is back. The post-1945 multilateral order is falling into disrepair. Everywhere you look, nationalism is on the march. States, established and rising, are disinterring traditional notions of national sovereignty. They want to reclaim the international system created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. They are chasing a chimera.

For a moment, after the collapse of communism, the future belonged to a postmodern state. This state would remain the essential building block of political organisation, but would recognise shared interests. Governments would discard narrow concepts of national interest in favour of co-operative security and prosperity. Strange though it seems to say after the tumult of recent years, but the EU was seen as a model for the new international order.

There was more to this than utopian daydreaming. Globalisation has tightened the ties of economic interdependence. Threats to nations are recognisably international in character – from climate change to pandemics, from terrorism and the proliferation of unconventional weapons to mass migration. Mobile capital, cross-border supply chains and the connections of the digital age leach power from individual states. The way to recapture lost authority is to act in concert.

The mood has changed. As the rising have become risen powers they are reluctant to embrace a rules-based system – the more so since the rules were largely written by the established powers. For its part, the US is stepping back from the role of global policeman. Even postmodern Europe, where rescuing the euro demands another leap towards integration, is wrestling with tensions between the national and supranational. Read more…

As published in www.ft.com on June 6, 2013.

31
May

Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine

Written on May 31, 2013 by Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta in Americas, Foreign Policy, Globalization & International Trade, International Conflict, Terrorism & Security, International Law & Organizations

By Charles Krauthammer

“This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises . . .”

     — Barack Obama, May 23

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Nice thought. But much as Obama would like to close his eyes, click his heels three times and declare the war on terror over, war is a two-way street.

That’s what history advises: Two sides to fight it, two to end it. By surrender (World War II), by armistice (Korea and Vietnam) or when the enemy simply disappears from the field (the Cold War).

Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The war on terror, 12 so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world to fend for itself — and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness.

John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to bear the burdens of the long twilight struggle. Obama, agonizing publicly about the awful burdens of command — his command, which he twice sought in election — wants out. For him and for us.

He doesn’t just want to revise and update the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which many conservatives have called for. He wants to repeal it.

He admits that the AUMF establishes the basis both in domestic and international law to conduct crucial defensive operations, such as drone strikes. Why, then, abolish the authority to do what we sometimes need to do?

Because that will make the war go away? Persuade our enemies to retire to their caves? Stop the spread of jihadism? Read more…

As published in www.washingtonpost.com on May 31, 2013

28
May

Bush’s war on terror is over

Written on May 28, 2013 by Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta in Americas, Foreign Policy, International Conflict, Terrorism & Security, International Law & Organizations, Middle East, News

By Peter Bergen

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In the past few weeks, we’ve seen a British soldier hacked to death with a meat cleaver on the streets of London and bombers blowing up spectators at the Boston Marathon.

On the surface, terrorism is alive and well.

So how should the United States react to these continuing threats?

For the first time on Thursday, President Obama laid out the full scope of his proposed counterterrorism strategy, and it boiled down to this: George W. Bush’s endless war on terror is over.

And that’s appropriate, since the enemy Bush went to war with after September 11 has largely been defeated.

Obama’s speech at the National Defense University in Washington was designed to lay the political groundwork to wind down America’s longest war, the war that began when al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center and a wing of the Pentagon 12 years ago.

Thursday’s speech was the first time Obama had delivered an overarching framework for how to conceptualize the conflict that has defined U.S. national security policy since 9/11.

Other speeches by Obama have focused on aspects of that conflict, such as Guantanamo and the Afghan war. But no speech has made such an expansive examination of the war against al Qaeda and its allies in all its manifestations, from drone strikes to detention policies to a clear-eyed assessment of the scope of the threats posed by al Qaeda and its affiliates, as well as by those “homegrown” extremists who attacked the Boston Marathon in April.

Much of the coverage of the speech has centered on the measures the president outlined to impose greater constraints on CIA drone strikes and to try to hasten the eventual closing of Guantanamo. Read more…

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad,” the basis for the HBO documentary “Manhunt”.

As published in www.cnn.com on May 26, 2013

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Authors

Ángeles Figueroa-Alcorta
Executive Director Bachelor in International Relations

Bachelor in I. RELATIONS

Master in I. Relations

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