It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left"). The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...
As one of WikiLeaks' defenders, I feel obligated to respond to Roger's post. I have two major disagreements with it. First, I think it significantly overstates the harm caused by WikiLeaks, although it would be equally erroneous to claim that WikiLeaks has caused no harm whatsoever. Second -- and perhaps more important -- it completely ignores the the benefits of...
One of the underlying issues in the Wikileaks controversy is whether Julian Assange is truly that harmful. His defenders, and even some of his critics, maintain that Assange is not that dangerous. I disagree. Diplomacy. Diplomacy will be immeasurably more difficult if what government officials say in secret to one another can never be trusted to remain secret. ...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
So thinks James P. Rubin in an Op-Ed in today's NY Times. His argument comes in two parts. First, a minority of the Senate plays an obstructionist role, which means that the United States simply doesn't join important treaties: For much of the world, treaty ratification is a simple matter. In parliamentary systems like those in Britain and France, ratification is virtually automatic,...
Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...
This is a wild tale of self-execution (which, I'm fairly sure, is the first time anyone has used the adjective "wild" to describe the self-execution concept). For years, the Bush Administration sought to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) to ease licensing restrictions on arms exports to two of the United States' closest allies -- the...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
Last week I had the privilege to attend an investment arbitration conference and FDI moot court competition at Pepperdine. Kudos to Murdoch University of Australia for winning the competition and my alma mater NYU for winning the highest overall ranking. There was much to ponder in the conference from the likes of Andrea Bjorkland, Todd Weiler, Anna Joubin-Bret...
[Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Director, Secretary’s Policy Planning Office, U.S. Department of State; Former Dean and (on leave) Professor, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. Catherine Powell is Staff Member, Secretary’s Policy Planning Office, U.S. Department of State; (on leave) Professor, Fordham Law School; Former Clinical Professor and Founding Director, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School.] With...
When asked the secret of his success, ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky is said to have responded “I skate where I think the puck will be”. This gets trotted out in a number of management texts as exemplifying the “planning school” of strategy. You can see how it might be applied to book publishers – I ponder what will be...
