Slaughter: Mind the neighbors
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate
The conventional wisdom last week on whether Syria would comply with former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s ceasefire plan was that it was up to Russia. We were reverting to Cold War politics, in which the West was unwilling to use force and Russia was willing to keep arming and supporting its client. Thus, Russia held the trump card: the choice of how much pressure it was willing to put on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to comply with the plan.
If this view were correct, Iran would surely be holding an equally powerful hand. Annan, after all, traveled to Tehran as well. Traditional balance-of-power geopolitics, it seems, is alive and well.
But this is, at best, a partial view that obscures as much as it reveals. In particular, it misses the crucial and growing importance of regional politics and institutions. FULL POST
Slaughter: A pivot to the people
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate
On February 1, the United Nations Security Council met to consider the Arab League’s proposal to end the violence in Syria. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton represented the United States. Midway through her remarks, she began speaking not to the Syrian ambassador, who was in the room, or even the Syrian government, but directly to the Syrian people. She said that change in Syria would require Syrians of every faith and ethnicity to work together, protecting and respecting the rights of minorities.
Addressing those minorities, she continued: “We do hear your fears, and we do honor your aspirations. Do not let the current regime exploit them to extend this crisis.” She told Syria’s business, military, and other leaders that they must recognize that their futures lie with the state, not with the regime. “Syria belongs to its 23 million citizens, not to one man or his family.” FULL POST
Slaughter: Turkey must act on Syria
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011), is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate
As the world watches the obliteration of the Syrian city of Homs and the crisis spills into neighboring Lebanon, it is time to ask what separates great powers from small powers. Turkey’s international star has risen steadily over the past few years, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan being lionized in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu traveling the world as the representative of an increasingly influential power. Indeed, Turkey and Indonesia have joined the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) on the list of the most important rising global players.
Now, in Syria’s carnage, Turkey is facing a critical test of its regional and global aspirations. It is time for its leaders to stop talking and start acting. FULL POST
Slaughter: 5 conditions for intervention in Syria
From Anne-Marie Slaughter, in The Atlantic:
[I]ntervention makes sense only if it actually has a higher chance of making things better than making them worse. In the Syrian case, a number of conditions would have to be met to satisfy this test. First, the Syrian opposition itself would have to call for some kind of armed intervention. Groups of protesters in different towns have requested international help, but the Syrian National Council would have to make a formal request.
Second, the Arab League would have to endorse this request by a substantial majority vote.
Third, the actual intervention proposed would in fact have to be limited to protection of civilians through buffer zones and humanitarian cordons around specific cities, perhaps accompanied by airstrikes against Syrian army tanks moving against those cities. It could not, as in Libya, take the form of active help to the opposition in their effort to topple the government. Instead, the Arab League should work with the opposition and members of the business community and the army within Syria to craft a political transition plan that would create some kind of unity government and a timetable for elections.
Fourth, the intervention would have to receive the authorization of a majority of the members of the U.N. Security Council - Russia, actively arming Assad, will probably never go along, no matter how necessary - as an exercise of the responsibility to protect doctrine, with clear limits to how and against whom force could be used built into the resolution.
Finally, Turkish and Arab troops would have to take the lead in creating zones to protect civilians, backed by NATO logistics and intelligence support if necessary.
Slaughter: Saving face and peace in the Gulf
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and author of The Idea that is America, is currently on a year-long sabbatical in Shanghai. For more from Slaughter, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Anne-Marie Slaughter.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter, Project Syndicate
The West and Iran are playing a dangerous game. In the past ten days, Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz and warned the United States against sending an aircraft carrier back into the Persian Gulf. The US predictably responded that its aircraft carriers could and would patrol wherever necessary to promote freedom of navigation. Iran then announced that it would conduct naval exercises in the Strait.
In the game of “chicken,” two cars drive straight at each other at top speed; either one driver “chickens out” and swerves, or they collide in a fireball. Governments around the world cannot stand by and watch that game play out across the world’s energy lifeline. It is time for third parties to step in and facilitate solutions that allow Iran to save face while significantly and credibly reducing its supply of enriched uranium. FULL POST
Slaughter: The future of foreign policy is public-private partnerships
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009 to 2011, she was the Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. Follow her on Twitter at slaughteram.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter – Special to CNN
On Black Friday, the apotheosis of consumerism and the celebration of private enterprise (entrepreneurial on-line marketers are targeting in-line consumers with ads sent to their cell phones while they wait to purchase goods in physical stores), it’s a good time to consider the power of harnessing private incentives to public goals.
Newt Gingrich made this point in the CNN national security debate for Republican presidential candidates on Tuesday night, arguing about how he would shave $500 billion out of the federal budget. “There are lots of things you can do,” he said, including giving foreign aid “in a way that we actually help people even more effectively and at a much lower cost by having public/private partnerships.”
Gingrich was unwittingly signing on to the Obama mantra. The Obama National Security Strategy mentions public-private partnerships over 30 times. Over the past 3 years both the White House and the State Department have set up offices to reach out to the private sector.
Notable successes include the Global Clean Cookstove Alliance, which brings together over 175 government agencies, corporations, NGOs and foundations around the world to secure the adoption of 100 million clean cookstoves by 2020, thereby reducing carbon emission, improving the health of tens of millions of families and increasing the security of millions of women. FULL POST
Why Anthony Weiner should not resign
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter at @slaughteram.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter – Special to CNN
Whenever I give a speech, someone in the audience is likely to come up afterwards and suggest that I run for office. I am flattered, but my response is always the same. If I lived in a country like Britain, where election campaigns are time-limited and publicly funded, I would certainly consider running for office, at least after my children have left home.
But in the American political system I could not imagine putting myself or my family through the endless fundraising, with its attendant focus on rich lobbyists and investors rather than actual constituents, and the relentless media and partisan scrutiny. The price exacted is simply too high, particularly when it is possible to serve in appointed office instead.
I am hardly alone in that calculation. Indeed, in my experience the willingness to run for office is increasingly rare among many of the people whom I would most like to see in Congress or state and local government. FULL POST
Rebellion of an Innovation Mom
Editor's Note: Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter at @slaughteram.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter – Special to CNN
Call it the rebellion of the mother of two adolescents against the Tiger Moms, but what this nation needs to be innovative and entrepreneurial is to ask our kids to do less.
Innovation requires creativity; entrepreneurship requires a willingness to break the rules. The jam packed, highly structured days of elite children are carefully calculated to create Ivy League-worthy resumes. They reinforce habits of discipline and conformity, programming remarkably well-rounded and often superb young people who can play near concert-quality violin, speak two languages, volunteer in their communities and get straight A’s.
These are the students that I see in my Princeton classes; I am often in awe of their accomplishments and teaching them is a joy. But I strongly suspect that they will not be the inventors of the next "new new thing". FULL POST
10 dynamic foreign policy tweeters
Editor’s Note: Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter is the former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. She is now a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. You can follow her on Twitter @slaughterAM, and watch her this Sunday at 10am on GPS on CNN. The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Dr. Slaughter.
Twitter is a tremendous source of foreign policy news. It’s my privately designed front page of multiple newspapers. I follow a combination of mainstream media, foreign policy experts in many different countries and lots of people on the ground – in the Middle East, in China and India.
Twitter provides this wonderful kaleidoscope of information, insight and the tangible sense of lived experience. All of this can then be distilled into deeper and more lasting foreign policy views.
Here are ten people to follow on Twitter for a lively foreign policy conversation.
1. Elmira Bayrasli (@endeavoringE): Musings on entrepreneurship, development, Turkey, the Middle East and the Mets.
2. Andy Carvin (@acarvin): Senior strategist at NPR; online community organizer since 1994; former director of the Digital Divide Network; curates tweets on the Middle East.
3. Christine Fair (@cchristinefair): Assistant Professor at Georgetown University specializing in South Asian political and military affairs. FULL POST
@fareedzakaria on Twitter
