After a worldwide removal of regulatory constraints, market forces have assumed a dominant role in the international financial system.
Reports
The ongoing struggle in Iran between Islamic reformers and Islamic hard-liners, along with struggles within the U.S. foreign policy establishment between hawks and those seeking accommodation, has left U.S.-Iranian relations in a state of flux.
In recent years, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been guided by two primary objectives or “tracks”: to isolate the Cuban government and to provide support to the Cuban population.
The North American Free Trade Agreement’s impact on the trinational environment remains controversial.
Sadly, though the overall number of nuclear weapons is down (from approximately 60,000 in 1990 to 35,000 today) and the antagonism of the cold war has faded, the risk of nuclear war is still real, and the threat of nuclear proliferation is greater than ever.
More than $60 billion spent on missile defense projects since 1983 has produced precious little beyond cost overruns and technical failures.
The military captures almost one-half of the entire federal discretionary budget--money for everything the government does from the FBI to Head Start, excluding only mandatory spending, primarily interest on the national debt and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
For most of the world’s poorest countries, multilateral debt looms larger than other debts because of the IFIs’ status as "preferred creditors," as providers of core development and balance-of-payment loans.
U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher has likened the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa to the plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century.
Environmentalists are increasingly demanding that international rules and corporate norms governing investment explicitly embrace environmental and social performance goals.