The Nation

Mr. Lessig Goes To Washington

Ron Tang — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:41:00 -0400

In late March, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig came to DC to draw back the curtain on the second act of his career. Lessig, with his placid mien and quiet voice, does not exude the aura of a star, but over the past decade he's become one of the most influential public intellectuals of the Internet age. Along with a small group of activists, legal academics and computer geeks, Lessig has built from scratch a global grassroots movement to reform copyright and intellectual property law. Videos of his lectures are passed along like samizdat by bloggers. "The first time I… more

Democratizing Capital

Ron Tang — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:53:00 -0400

Below is a longer version of the article published in The Nation. For the version appearing in The Nation, please click here.

Historical analogies are never exact. Yet many of the choices we have before us today are similar to ones that an earlier generation of progressives faced as the 1932 election approached. As we do today, the progressives of the 20th century confronted a society beset by a huge gap between classes and an economy laid flat by the bursting of the speculative excesses of the previous decade. To be sure, our economy is nowhere near Depression levels… more

Undebated Challenges

Articles — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:35:00 -0500

The most damaging part of the Bush foreign policy legacy is not the precipitous decline in American power and influence brought about by the disastrous Iraq occupation. It is the way the Administration’s "war on terror" and its neoimperial project in the Middle East have distorted our vision of the world.

They magnify out of all proportion what should at worst be minor threats to our national security and ignore much larger developments, such as the extraordinary economic rise of China and India, which are having a much more profound effect on the American way of life.

Just how distorted our… more

Jobs, Justice and Democracy

adminn — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:24:00 -0500

"My issue is cooking oil," Dya Alawa, a 37-year-old Turkish woman said on the day of Turkey's historic July election, which saw the Justice and Development Party (AKP) emerge with a resounding victory. "That's why I'm voting AKP," she told the Washington Post. For her, the election was simple: the economy has improved under AKP stewardship since 2002, her husband has less fear of layoffs at his textile factory and she can buy cooking oil at reasonable prices.

Indeed, Alawa is not alone. While the Turkish elections grabbed headlines and raised questions about the country's "secular soul" -- as the AKP, a party with its roots… more

Avoiding the Toughness Trap

Articles — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:23:00 -0500

There is a surreal quality to many of the foreign policy arguments being put forward in the 2008 presidential campaign, particularly among Republican presidential hopefuls. The Bush Administration’s fiasco in Iraq is a transformative event that calls for a fundamental re-thinking of US security strategy. The policies of "preventive" war, forward basing of US troops aimed at intimidating designated adversaries and unbridled support for missile defense and new nuclear weapons should all be cast aside in search of a new approach.

While scrupulously avoiding reference to George W. Bush by name, the top Republican candidates have embraced the worst aspects… more

Exporting Instability

Articles — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 08:44:00 -0400

Under the guise of promoting a "security dialogue" in the Persian Gulf, the Bush Administration has proposed $63 billion in arms transfers to the Middle East over the next ten years. As is so often the case, team Bush seems to prefer to let the weapons do the talking, even when it claims to be engaging in diplomacy. The foundation of the deal is a pledge to sell $20 billion worth of high-tech arms to Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states in the Gulf. Items in the package reportedly include upgrades to Riyadh’s US-supplied fighter planes, satellite-guided bombs and… more

For Liberal Internationalism

Articles — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:59:00 -0400

The neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush is a catastrophic failure -- this is conceded even by a growing number of neoconservatives. As an alternative to the Bush Doctrine of US global hegemony, contempt for international law and support for regime change by armed intervention, liberal internationalism ought to be enjoying a renaissance. Instead, the body of strategic principles that guided US foreign policy at its best during the twentieth century is threatened. The greatest threat to liberal internationalism comes not from without -- from neoconservatives, realists and isolationists who reject the liberal internationalist tradition as a whole --… more

The Nation Highlights New America's U.S.-Cuba Policy Event

Communications — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:16:00 -0400

New America in the News:

What do you call a US policy...that has been repudiated at the United Nations by virtually every other country in the world? A policy that, after forty-eight years of abject failure, is still based on the false assumption that success--in the form of "regime change"--is just around the corner? Imperial. Illogical. Irrational. Insane...

The next occupant of the White House will have an unusual opportunity to bring US policy toward Cuba into the twenty-first century. Slowly but surely, the political actors are realigning...

In Washington, there is a reinvigorated, and increasingly bipartisan, effort to pressure Bush, presidential contenders and the new Congress to lift parts of the embargo and move toward normal relations. On April 18, for example, the New America Foundation launched an initiative to shape a "new consensus" on Cuba at a press conference featuring Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Speakers at the event echoed a recent report from the Center for Democracy in the Americas, In Our National Interest: Top Ten Reasons for Changing US Policy Toward Cuba: "We need a new Cuba policy rooted in America's national interest and our common sense."

Those reasons, which include the constitutional right to travel, the harm the embargo has done to American business and the advancement of US security interests such as drug interdiction, have begun to resonate in Congress. Bills are being introduced to lift or modify the trade and travel embargoes. In an opinion piece in the April 14 Washington Post, Republican Jeff Flake and Democrat Charles Rangel argued that it is time to "increase American influence by building bridges rather than barriers to Cuba..."

For the complete article, please visit The Nation website.

For more information on New America's recent U.S. - Cuba Policy event, please click here.

The Nation's Blog Quotes Flynt Leverett on 2003 Iran Proposal

Communications — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:00:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Did the Bush Administration miss a major opportunity in the spring of 2003 to engage Iran and stabilize the Middle East? Two high-ranking former Administration officials contend it did.

In May 2003, Iran faxed a letter to the State Department, via the Swiss ambassador to Iran, proposing a sweeping realignment in US-Iranian relations. Iran offered "full transparency" on its nuclear enrichment program, to take "decisive action against any terrorists (above all Al Qaeda) on Iranian territory," to help stabilize Iraq and establish democratic institutions there, to disarm Hezbollah, to stop "material support to Palestinian opposition groups," and accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In exchange, the Iranian government asked the US government to foreswear regime change, abolish sanctions, crack down on the terrorist group MEK and allow Iran to develop peaceful nuclear technology.

"What the Iranians offered in 2003 was nothing short of a Nixon-in-China breakthrough in US-Iranian relations," said Flynt Leverett, the Bush Administration's former top official on Middle East policy at the National Security Council, at a conference on Iran sponsored by the New America Foundation today. "The Bush Administration, for its own reasons, rejected it."

According to Leverett, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said he "couldn't sell it at the White House." Added Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's top deputy: "I doubt Powell thought he had the power or political capitol" to take on Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, who opposed negotiations with Iran...

For the complete article, please visit The Nation's blog - The Notion.

Waltzing With Warlords

Articles — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:43:00 -0500

On a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of Kabul, a couple of street kids gesture toward an unmarked iron gate behind which they assure us we can find what we are looking for. An Afghan guard gives us a wary once-over and opens the gate onto a dark garden at the end of which a door is slightly ajar. I open it and step into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul, where most women wear burqas and the vast majority of the population live in grinding… more