military spending

Just Counter-Terrorism

Back in September 2002, Maher Arar was passing through JFK airport in New York. He was expecting a simple transit. A Syrian-born Canadian citizen and wireless technology consultant, Arar was traveling home to Ottawa after a vacation with his family in Tunis. The stopover in New York was the best deal he could get with his frequent flyer miles. He had no inkling of what would happen next. He didn’t know that he would spend the next ten months being tortured in a secret jail.

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Just Peace

Asha Hagi Elmi was horrified at what was happening in her country. A member of the Somali parliament and leading women’s rights activist, Elmi watched the Ethiopian invasion in December 2006 push her country from precarious stability over the edge into catastrophe.” There is no food, no shelter, no water, no medicine and people are dying every day, children are dying every day,” she told a British reporter in April 2007.1 In the ensuing war among Somali insurgents, Somali clans, and Ethiopian troops, thousands have died. The fighting has also created a large-scale humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of refugees.

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The Self-Destructive Logic of War

“You go to war with the army you have,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously noted.” “They might not be the army you want or have at a later time.” Echoing Rumsfeld, President Bush said in his 2007 State of the Union Address, “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in.”

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Strategic Partnership or Strategic Competition

As part of our China Focus, we asked two leading scholars to reflect on the tensions and possibilities in U.S.-China relations. Bonnie Glaser is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. James Nolt is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. We asked them first about the potential for a strategic security partnership between the United States and China, then about their economic relationship.

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