Nearly a week after the event, Thailand is still stunned by the military assault on the Red Shirt encampment in the tourist center of the capital city of Bangkok on May 19. The Thai government is treating captured Red Shirt leaders and militants like they’re from an occupied country. No doubt about it: A state of civil war exists in this country, and civil wars are never pretty.
With multiple crises affecting our world – global economy, climate change, resource depletion – we must urgently redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on preparing for war. The United States is far and away the largest military spender, accounting for nearly 50% of all global military expenditures. Together, the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea spent nearly $1 trillion in 2008 on the military. And despite the current financial crisis, military spending and arms exports are on the rise.
Yet, for about one-tenth of this near-trillion dollar amount – about $90 billion a year – we can achieve more genuine security by eliminating global starvation and malnutrition, educating every child on earth, making clean water and sanitation accessible for all, and reversing the global spread of AIDS and malaria.
It is time for the G-20 to take a stand on military spending. It is time for the richest countries of the world, beginning with the United States, to take the lead in shifting military spending to human needs. The world can’t wait.
Last year, as the financial crisis reached global and historic proportions, many commentators identified one institution as the debacle’s great winner: the International Monetary Fund. Just two years ago, the IMF seemed to be on an inexorable downward path: its credibility and effectiveness in question, its portfolio of borrowers severely reduced, its legitimacy and governance structure under challenge, and its own finances in disarray. In fact, the Fund had started “downsizing” its staff as the only way to avoid running one of the deficits that it so strongly advises client countries to steer away from.
The Group of 20 (G20) is making a big show of getting together to come to grips with the global economic crisis. But here’s the problem with the upcoming summit in London on April 2: It’s all show. What the show masks is a very deep worry and fear among the global elite that it really doesn’t know the direction in which the world economy is heading and the measures needed to stabilize it.
The leaders of the G20 will meet on April 2 in London. One item on their agenda will be to consider enhancing the International Monetary Fund’s role in international financial governance. This can only be successfully achieved if the IMF undergoes substantial reforms that require either difficult political compromises or amendments to the Fund’s Articles of Agreement, the formal international treaty that created the IMF and that has only been amended three times since the organization’s inception in 1946.
It’s official. President Barack Obama now fully owns the war in Afghanistan. Standing alongside his military advisors and in front of the Washington press corps, he outlined a plan with “a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” While the goal and the five objectives to meet this goal are clear, they’re also unattainable and will likely result in the U.S. (and NATO) being trapped in the region for decades to come.
As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world’s governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist.
The evidence that its members states are seeking to escape from the International Monetary Fund’s “jurisdiction” continues to mount. Most recently, Uruguay, the IMF’s third largest borrower, became the latest country to announce that it was prepaying its outstanding obligations to the IMF, and the IMF was forced to downgrade the multilateral consultations on global economic imbalances that it had proudly unveiled in April because leading economic powers have proved reluctant to fully engage in these consultations.
It’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. I’m in a Singapore police station. No, this story doesn’t involve alcohol. Fortunately neither the death penalty nor caning is likely. The story begins earlier on September 16, when I arrived in Singapore, the site of the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, from neighboring Batam, […]
Between Monday, September 17 and Thursday, September 20, FPIF circulated the following sign-on letter via the Internet. Over 1,800 people, mainly academics and foreign policy experts signed the letter–a remarkable response over a short period of time. We sent out a press release Thursday afternoon, just prior to President Bush’s speech to Congress and the country, and distributed the statement to all congressional members. Those who signed included professors from 83 different colleges and universities, students from 40 academic institutions, and people from 18 different countries, ranging from Cameroon to Pakistan to Ukraine. A number of the signers also sent notes and comments.