We asked our senior analysts at Foreign Policy In Focus to weigh in on the future course of American foreign policy. This is the question they responded to: “The enormous challenges facing us — economic crisis, climate crisis, nuclear proliferation — require unprecedented global cooperation. Will President Barack Obama draw down the American empire in order to meet these challenges? Or will he do what he can to maintain empire in a different form?”
Madagascar, a tourist paradise of beaches and exotic animals, is home to one of the most uninterrupted cycles of coups and crises in Africa.
Democracy hasn’t settled easily on the world’s fourth largest island. Like so many other African nations still struggling still with their colonial past, Madagascar was left by France in 1960 ill-equipped for free and fair elections. It experienced political upheaval for much of the post-colonial period. In 2002, the United States recognized the current president — the country’s sixth — after he grabbed power in a coup that left dozens of Malagasy dead. That coup, and the creation of Marc Ravalomanana’s government, was the fifth political crisis to successfully unseat a president in 30 years.
On January 26, this cycle of political upheaval began again. Andry Rajoelina, the ousted mayor of the capital city, accused Ravalomanana of leading a dictatorship. Soon after that came protests, marches, and bloodshed. On March 17, days after Rajoelina burst into the unoccupied presidential palace with gunshots and mortar fire, Ravalomanana handed power over to the military.
As part of our Empire Strategic Focus, Foreign Policy In Focus asked several experts to weigh in on whether Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an important step forward for the international system or a step backward to great power intervention, and how should the Obama administration approach this doctrine. Shaun Randol strongly embraced the new principle, Trevor Keck and Bridget Moix emphasized the preventative aspects of R2P, and Kevin Fake and Steven Funk offered a skeptical appraisal. In this dialogue, they take the conversation one step further.
“The mice would be disciplined and the lions would be free,” said a Mexican delegate to the proceedings that created the UN charter in 1945. He astutely predicted the double standards that would govern the application of international law.
Because it provides a framework for the prevention of impending humanitarian disaster or for the arrest of a crisis underway, the United Nation’s doctrine on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a notable step forward for the international system. Passing R2P is a move in a right and cooperative direction, one that seeks to further elevate international law and justice. But what’s next? Despite UN Security Council approval in 2006, R2P has yet to be invoked to improve areas currently inundated by natural and manmade suffering. The bottleneck lies in translating concepts into deeds. R2P, it seems, passed on a faulty premise — that there are and will be individual and groups of states with the physical means and political will to invoke and act on their responsibilities to protect.
Time and again, the world has failed to prevent or halt the worst forms of human rights abuses — genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. The Holocaust, the killing fields of Kampuchea, and the genocide in Rwanda are just a few examples where a host government has failed to protect its citizens or been complicit in committing massacres. In most cases, these massacres occurred in the context of ongoing war or conflict, often behind the curtain of state sovereignty, with the international community turning a blind eye or intervening only to witness the evidence of mass killing.
Hopes that a Democratic administration with an expanded Democratic congressional majority might lead to a more ethical, rational, and progressive foreign policy were challenged with last week’s passage of the 2009 omnibus budget bill, which included many troubling provisions regarding the State Department and related diplomatic functions.
While there is no doubt that President Barack Obama is winning hearts around world, the jury is still out on whether he can convince skeptical intellectuals. A surge in Afghanistan, residual troops in Iraq and the resumption of renditions in the Horn of Africa conjure up fears of quagmires.
This is part of a strategic dialogue on Yugoslavia. See John Feffer’s opposing argument here, and their respective responses here. The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.
Economic hardship, discrimination, and violence have driven millions of women to work in the sex sector around the world, and their numbers will increase as a result of the current global economic crisis. Unless the underlying factors pushing women to opt for selling sex to support themselves and their families are remedied, many women will continue to have few other options.