If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution, feminist anarchist Emma Goldman famously said. Fortunately, this year, world revolution had a great soundtrack. It was a breakthrough year for musicians fighting the good fight. Check out the following 10 albums, which Foreign Policy In Focus recommends for your end-of-the-year celebrations.
Rose Marie Berger and Joseph Ross co-edited the collection, Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings in conjunction with an exhibition of the Botero paintings at the American University Museum in Washington, DC. Here, they talk with FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller about what inspired them to work on this project.
A sizable number of progressive activists, celebrities and unions who, for various reasons, are unwilling to support the underfunded long-shot bid of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich are backing the presidential campaign of former North Carolina Senator John Edwards as their favorite among the top-tier candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Indeed, the charismatic populist has staked out positions on important domestic policy issues, particularly addressing economic justice, that are more progressive than any serious contender for the nomination of either party in many years.
When the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released noting that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the council moved into action. Unanimously, it passed a resolution ensuring that no preemptive military attack by the United States against Iran would take place.
While much attention has been given to Senator Hillary Clinton’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, her foreign policy record regarding other international conflicts and her apparent eagerness to accept the use of force appears to indicate that her fateful vote authorizing the invasion and her subsequent support for the occupation and counter-insurgency war was no aberration. Indeed, there’s every indication that, as president, her foreign policy agenda would closely parallel that of the Bush administration. Despite efforts by some conservative Republicans to portray her as being on the left wing of the Democratic Party, in reality her foreign policy positions bear a far closer resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan than they do of George McGovern.
It is through the eyes of the very young that the rest of us, even the only slightly older, often get a glimpse of what is actually happening.
Albert Beveridge was a promising politician in his thirties when he stood up to speak in favor of war and the promotion of democracy to his peers in the U.S. Senate. A historian, Beveridge unabashedly called for the United States to remake the globe. “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world,” Beveridge proclaimed. “And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.”
Current U.S. foreign policy is unjust and breeds insecurity for all. In seeking an alternative, we should not revive the failed policies of the past. Instead, we should chart a new relationship between the United States and the world.
This alternative foreign policy framework tells five different stories about our common future and the five principal challenges we face: climate change, global poverty, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and military conflict. We address five different sets of core misconceptions and offer five interconnected prescriptions for change. We then offer a Just Security budget that would cut roughly $213 billion from the president’s current defense budget request and yet make the United States safer and more secure. The concluding chapter puts the challenges facing the United States in a larger historical context and offers an integrated Just Security program.
Five years ago the Bush administration launched its war on terror without end. About 90% of Americans applauded. The administration has been ramping up the fear to win elections ever since. This strategy is no longer working. Soon the talk shows and editorial pages will be chewing over exit polling to opine about the impact of the war on the election. But it’s already clear that decisive majorities of Americans have had enough of a militarized, unilateral foreign policy.
This volume portrays the challenges and questions facing Americans and their government at a time when a new global order is being defined by transnational corporations, when the dimensions of U.S. military power bear little relation to threats, and when most global crises call for international solutions. The volume outlines the principles, practices, and policy alternatives that would help to make the U.S. a more responsible global leader and global partner.