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| 1 |
ID:
134789
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| Summary/Abstract |
In about two months, more than 90 million Americans (roughly 40% of those eligible to vote) will elect 435 members of the US House of Representatives and 36 members of the US Senate. The results of this midterm election will go a long way in determining the direction and extent of political change during the next two years. At present, like the nation itself, Congress is divided. Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, Republicans a majority in the House. To take control of the House, Democrats must gain 17 seats beyond the 201 they won in 2012 or 19 more than their current 199 seats (with three vacancies). Republicans must pick up six seats to regain their Senate majority. The Senate’s current party division is 53 Democrats and 45 Republicans. The two independents who caucus with the Democrats and the vice presidential tie-breaker put the Republicans’ magic number at six.
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| 2 |
ID:
134566
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article argues that long-term changes in Turkish foreign policy are primarily due to the diversification of the country's political and economic interests. Important international structural shifts such as the end of the Cold War or the broad fluctuations in oil prices have constituted the initial impetus for the changes that we have seen in Turkish policies. Discussing alternative perspectives on new activism in Turkish foreign policy, the article gauges Turkey's foreign policy affinity (based on voting patterns in the United Nations General Assembly) and trade with other states to place recent trends in the broader context of the past three decades. It shows that, as the “West” has become less coherent in its policies, Turkey has moved closer to EU members and distanced itself from the US. The data also undermine “shift of axis” arguments as Turkey's foreign policy affinity with Middle Eastern countries has, in fact, declined. The trade data reveal a diversification of the country's commercial interests that contribute to Turkey's increasing regional activism. The country now balances its long term European interests with its recent regional ones.
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| 3 |
ID:
134560
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is essential that Russia avoid unilateral involvement in Afghan affairs, which otherwise would have adverse consequences for Russia’s national interests both regionally and internationally. And this is the scenario the U.S. is likely to try to push forward given current tense U.S.-Russia relations.
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| 4 |
ID:
135140
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Twenty years ago this month, North Korea and the United States concluded the Agreed Framework. That accord halted North Korea’s nuclear weapons program at Yongbyon in exchange for heavy fuel oil and the eventual provision of two light-water reactors (LWRs) at Kumho, North Korea.
The agreement was the result of prolonged negotiations during a tense period. Unfortunately, its success was temporary. Eventually it became clear that North Korea in the late 1990s was pursuing a clandestine program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons in violation of the Agreed Framework. In October 2002, when an official U.S. delegation confronted the senior North Korean negotiator with this information during talks in Pyongyang, the negotiator admitted that North Korea was pursuing an enrichment program and other unspecified programs.
Subsequent to this admission, North Korean officials maintained that they did not have an enrichment program. They changed their story again in 2010, when they revealed to visiting U.S. nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker that they had an enrichment facility at Yongbyon with 2,000 spinning centrifuges. Hecker was permitted to visit this facility and was impressed with its sophistication.[1] Thus, the issue of North Korea’s clandestine enrichment program was finally put to rest. North Korea proudly admitted having the program, despite its past disclaimers and the skepticism of observers in the United States and China who questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that North Korea had a clandestine enrichment program for nuclear weapons development
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| 5 |
ID:
136447
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In the mid-1990s, unprecedented interventions by private companies specializing in the delivery of military muscle and know-how began altering the dynamics of local conflicts. Since then, private military and security companies have transformed the dynamics of local security delivery around the world, most prominently in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process, the private military industry has generated plenty of profit and attention, both alarmist and analytical. Two totems of research into the burgeoning industry and its implications are Corporate Warriors by P.W. Singer and The Market for Force by Deborah Avant. Nearly a decade after their publication, these books remain among the most in-depth and sustained treatments of the industry. This essay looks back at the arguments presented in each book and their influence on subsequent research on military privatization.
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| 6 |
ID:
136497
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| Summary/Abstract |
According to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Internet is among the few things humans have built that they do not truly under- stand. The Internet is a network of networks, a huge and decentralized web of computer systems designed to transmit information using spe- cific standard protocols. Nations and individuals rely on the Internet on a daily basis to conduct business, connect with friends, and even find love. To state the Internet is an integral part of our way of life is not an overstatement. The Internet allows for friendships, alliances and enmities between states to be extended into the virtual world, adding a new and intriguing dimension to traditional statecraft. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Martin E. Dempsey stated, “the spread of digital technology has not been without consequence. It has also introduced new dangers to our security and our safety.”1
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| 7 |
ID:
137235
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Twenty years after the deal struck between the United States and North Korea over the nuclear crisis, the security environment on the Korean Peninsula remains unstable. When it comes to the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework from 1994 through 2002, previous research has paid scant attention to how the U.S. Congress responded to President Clinton’s accord with the Pyongyang regime. This article
provides a rare empirical assessment of what led America’s lawmakers to uphold or overturn the executive agreements with North Korea. The bottom-line finding is that politics hardly stops at the water’s edge, with “politics-as-usual” forces such as partisan conflicts ultimately having derailed Congressional commitments to the U.S.-DPRK accords. The results shed light on how and why domestic politics often redirects the course of international agreements, particularly in the era of
polarized politics.
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| 8 |
ID:
135072
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| Summary/Abstract |
Purpose—This article explores the politicization of North Korean human rights in US. foreign policy and the emergence of two different networks addressing suffering inside North Korea.
Design/methodology/approach—Drawing on evidence from primary and secondary accounts, interviews with human rights activists, and participant —observation at thirteen North Korean human rights events in Washington, D.(I., 1 trace the evolution of human rights action and discourse from the 19903 to the present
period.
Findir1gs—Short~ and long—term strategic goals interacted with different moral and principled beliefs, thus resulting in two different policy—activist networks working to alleviate the plight of North Koreans. One group stressed continued humanitarian engagement with North Korea. A second network emerged, shifting their focus towards advocacy and awareness, demanding greater political rights and freedoms for North Koreans.
Practical 1mplica1ions—This article helps identify different cleavages and areas for convergence for activists, practitioners, and policymakers when addressing North Korean human rights.
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| 9 |
ID:
135400
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The 2014 elections are over and the Republican Party has emerged victorious. Beyond anyone’s expectations they have picked up eight new seats in the Senate (possibly one more after Louisiana completes a run-off), at least 12 more seats in the House of Representatives, and three new governorships. The vaunted Democratic voter-turnout technology was simply no match for a sour public mood. Two weeks before election day, when President Obama declared that his policies were on the ballot, even though his name would not formally appear in any state, he was surely correct. The election was all about Obama. Interestingly, Republicans only needed one message: ‘We are not the party of Barack Obama.’
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| 10 |
ID:
136697
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| Summary/Abstract |
The disparities in per-capita wealth and national productivity that divide the United States and Latin America today have often been understood as results of institutional variations introduced during each region's period of imperial rule. According to this interpretation, path-dependent processes preserved institutions installed by Britain, Spain, and Portugal across the centuries, propagating their positive or negative economic effects, and eventually producing a marked “development gap” in the hemisphere. This article aims to improve this account by highlighting the direct and indirect economic effects of the success or failure of the political unions established after independence in both the United States and Latin America. It demonstrates that influential political theorists throughout the hemisphere understood the developmental advantages to be gained from unifying former colonies and employing the political authority newly at their disposal to abolish the stifling institutional legacies of European rule, suggesting that if Spanish America's unions had endured, or conversely, if the United States had collapsed, the two regions' economies might not have diverged as dramatically as they subsequently did. This illustrates an important contribution that the emerging subfield of “comparative political theory” can make to comparative political science in general, and to the new institutionalism in particular, by providing uniquely direct insight into the choices available to political actors in consequential moments of institutional genesis and change, and revealing the contingency of institutional variations that might otherwise appear inevitable.
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| 11 |
ID:
135924
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the Second World War the United States sent billions of dollars worth of military equipment and supplies to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. In the Soviet official memory of the war, however, Lend-Lease aid was either marginalized or disappeared completely. Past scholars and even Soviet rulers have given different reasons for this amnesia, which often include a paranoid Stalin or high tensions during the Cold War. This essay argues instead that Marx’s ideology was mainly responsible for marginalizing the memory of U.S. aid to the Soviet Union. For many, World War II legitimized the Soviet’s collective economy. The memory of aid from the capitalist West did not fit the ideological narrative and thus was forgotten. It also demonstrates how memory can be shaped to fit an ideological view.
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| 12 |
ID:
135345
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is widely recognised that the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ fluctuated following the Second World War. A “Persistent rivalry” was especially evident in policy towards the Middle East and its oil. Immediately after the war, the American attitude to Palestine seemed to complicate British policy. Events in Iran also reflected the clash between the British imperative to protect its national and imperial interests in the region on the one hand, and the American preoccupation with the Cold War and containment on the other. The subsequent differences over Egypt/ Nasser are a matter of public record as are the problems which arose over the British withdrawal from “East of Suez”. Perhaps the very closeness of the relationship between the UK and the US served to heighten expectations.
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| 13 |
ID:
136593
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growing political split on the question of Palestine between a more diverse and engaged younger population and an older generation reared on the long-standing tropes of Israel’s discourse. Drawing analogies between this paradigm shift and the turning point in the civil rights movement enshrined in Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer, author and scholar Robin Kelley goes on to ask whether the outrage of the summer of 2014 can be galvanized to transform official U.S. policy.
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| 14 |
ID:
136500
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| Summary/Abstract |
For much of the last century, the United States led the world in technological innovation—a position it owed in part to well-designed procurement programs at the Defense Department and NASA. During the 1940s, for example, the Pentagon FUNDED the construction of the first general-purpose computer, designed initially to calculate artillery-firing tables for the U.S. Army. Two decades later, it developed the data communications network known as the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. Yet not since the 1980s have government contracts helped generate any major new technologies, despite large increases in funding for defense-related R & D. One major culprit was a shift to procurement efforts that benefit traditional defense contractors while shutting out start-ups.
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| 15 |
ID:
135555
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| Summary/Abstract |
Until recently, it was a safe assumption that it would be impossibly hard to sell a book by an obscure left-wing French intellectual to Americans, especially a 700-page tome. No longer. This spring Thomas Piketty, a 43-year-old Paris-based economist and expert on wealth and inequality, published Capital in the Twenty-First Century in English. The book compares how wealth patterns have evolved in different countries over the past few centuries and points out that inequality has been rising almost everywhere, including in the United States. Piketty’s academic publisher initially expected to sell only a modest number of copies. But Capital shot into best-sellers lists. Sales of the book were so high that it even beat out two literary adaptations of Frozen, the hit Disney film. When Piketty appeared at literary events to discuss his work, he attracted such crowds that American media dubbed him a “rock star” economist.
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| 16 |
ID:
135509
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| Summary/Abstract |
The optimized fleet response plan will allow the Navy to maximize operational availability while providing greater predictability for sailor and adaptability for policy makers.
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| 17 |
ID:
134457
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, we assess the impact of counterterrorism measures on trade. Our work brings three value addition to the literature: (1) it develops a simple theory to emphasize the endogeneity between terrorism acts, counterterrorism measures, and trade; (2) it delivers an original strategy to identify empirically the effect of counterterrorism security measures on trade flows (using third country incidents); and (3) it uses a new data set on business visas issued by the United States to test further the hypothesis that terrorism is affecting trade through the security channel. Our results suggest that counterterrorism security measures matter for US imports. The level of the impact is up to three times higher when the acts result in a relatively high number of victims, when the products are sensitive to shipping time, or when they ask for networks and business people mobility in order to be sold.
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| 18 |
ID:
135996
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Drawing from the concept of citizenship in the novel, Starship Troopers, we consider public opinion in a world in which “service guarantees citizenship.” We do this by examining the political attitudes of US (volunteer) veterans—a group generally neglected in the public opinion literature—relative to the adult population at large. Using data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that, as a group, veterans tend to be more ideologically conservative and more likely to identify as Republican than their nonveteran counterparts. This finding holds for both individual issues and self-identification.
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| 19 |
ID:
135167
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Rose Gottemoeller is undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. She previously was assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance. While in that position, she served as the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia.
During the Clinton administration, she held positions in the Department of Energy and on the National Security Council staff dealing with nuclear weapons issues in the former Soviet Union.
Gottemoeller spoke with Arms Control Today in her office on October 9. Much of the discussion focused on U.S.-Russian nuclear relations and U.S. progress in meeting its commitments under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
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| 20 |
ID:
136493
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Russia’s annexation of Crimea and ongoing efforts to de-stabilize Eastern Ukraine have led NATO and the US to adopt a number of initiatives aimed at “reassuring” Eastern and Central European allies. This article assesses the implications of those initiatives for NATO’s evolving position in Eastern Europe. It also appraises the Alliance’s renewed focus on defense and deterrence with respect to European and transatlantic capabilities.
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