The Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program: Recent and Upcoming Events

For nearly half a century, the Cold War dominated U.S. foreign policy. Encompassing some of America's greatest successes and failures, its legacy has shaped U.S. debates over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relations with Russia, China and Iran. What are the right and wrong lessons to take from America's long "twilight struggle"? And how has the reality of the Cold War been distorted in public memory in the years since?

Please join New America in a conversation between Janine Wedel and Michael Lind about her new book Shadow Elite. Governments and administrations come and go, but not so a new breed of power brokers, who always seem to pop up just where the action is. Wearing different hats, they press their agendas in venue after venue. According to award-winning public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine Wedel, these are the "shadow elite," the prime movers in a vexing new system of power and influence.

On October 30, panelists Tia Nelson, Nigel Purvis, and Steve Schwartzman discussed the new market mechanism, REDD -- Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation -- that aims to allow residents of tropical forest properties to earn more money from standing forests than from their removal. Tropical deforestation accounts for 20 percent of all carbon emissions into the atmosphere, more than the combined emissions of every car, truck, ship, plane and train on the planet. The panelists

Please join New America in a conversation between Zachary Karabell and Steve Coll about the book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It.

Only five years ago, programs like "ER," "The West Wing," and "The Wire" were exploring the major policy issues of our times:  access to health care; the war in Iraq; and the battle over drug abuse in the inner city.   Television in the past has played a vibrant role in dramatizing the complexities of policy debate, but are shows today continuing that legacy?  Do dramatic programs capture and reflect social policy issues and dilemmas?  In light of the demise of… more

On October 1, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda outlined the challenges and opportunities currently faced by Latin America. In conversation with Andres Martinez, the Director of New America's Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program, Mr. Castañeda discussed the continent's fraught attempts to develop a working framework for collective action, even as its major players start to focus their attention on increasing their clout on the global stage.

Please join us in a lunch discussion featuring two dynamic authors. Nicholas Schmidle, author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan will discuss the most recent and turbulent period of Pakistan’s history. His observations provide a contemporary history of this country at a time when President Pervez Musharraf’s power was waning and the Taliban’s was growing, and when Americans began to realize that Pakistan’s fate is inextricably linked with our own.

On September 15, Nicholas Thompson discussed his new book The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Covering the remarkable rivalry and friendship bonding two of the nation's foremost foreign policy thinkers, Paul Nitze and George Kennan, the event was moderated by Andrés Martinez, Director of Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program.

Patrick Radden Keefe, a Fellow at The Century Foundation, discussed his new book, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream. The book tells how "Sister Ping," the entrepreneurial human smuggler based in New York's Chinatown, built a global criminal network. The Snakehead also relates the events that led to Sister Ping's downfall, when the "Golden Venture," the ship on which some three hundred undocumented Chinese immigrants had made a four-month journey in a cramped, windowless hold, ran

On July 23 Seth Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, joined the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen, senior fellow and co-director of the New America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, to discuss Afghanistan and Jones' recently published book, In The Graveyard of Empires.  

A New America Foundation/Washington Monthly event

Late last year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called California’s looming budget crisis a fiscal armageddon waiting to strike. Now, as the state faces a $24 billion budget shortfall and major cuts are inevitable, doomsday seems to have come to California, and particularly to its poorest. The one-million-plus Californians on CalWorks, the state’s main welfare program, could lose monthly income beginning in July. Support for those who care for disabled Californians is set to be slashed.

Pete Wilson’s California wasn’t too different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. The state’s education system lagged behind the rest of the country, interest groups had a tight grip on Sacramento, healthcare costs were rising, and the economy was the worst it had been since the Great Depression. While Wilson may be best remembered for his more controversial stances—like supporting Proposition 187, which sought to refuse services to illegal immigrants—he also managed to pass budgets and break partisan stalemates, ultimately leaving his successor… more

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were… more

Is our people's God jealous of your people's God? Should religion unite us or divide us? Is our view of your God driven by theology, or is it shaped by whether we want to trade with you or take your land? Why can't we all just get along, anyway?

American journalism has entered a phase of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Gone are the fat profit margins that once underwrote investigative teams and deep, experienced teams of reporters to monitor and hold accountable both government and private power. New and exciting forms of journalism are sprouting, but new business models have yet to evolve to replace the old ones that are crumbling.

A discussion with Authors Phillip Longman and Ray Boshara, with Commentary by Mark Schmitt and Reihan Salam.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld is the dark, riveting journey through the panoply of criminal organizations flourishing in an increasingly globalized world, reaching from the sex trade in Bulgaria and internet fraud in Nigeria to the ‘caviar mafia’ in Central Asia and marijuana markets in British Columbia.