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Playing to win in a changing world
I’m pleased to announce that a book that I’ve spent much of the past two years working on with Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World , will be published on February 1st. It presents Lee’s judgments—in his own words ...
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The past decade has seen much commentary about the perils of triumphalism—with good reason. That sentiment contributed not only to America’s decisions to invade Iraq and undertake a nation-building effort in Afghanistan, but also to the “irrational exuberance” of lenders and consumers that burst ...
I mentioned in my last post that I had attended the Economist’s “The World in 2013” festival. Here are some zingers (paraphrased) that got my attention: Peter Orszag: Life expectancy for the poorest 30% of Americans will decline next year. Bill Easterly: China’s growth miracle is done ...
I recently attended the second day of the Economist’s “The World in 2013” festival, and will be writing a post soon with some of my takeaways. Today, however, I want to share some nuggets from the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC’s) new, highly anticipated report, Global Trends 2030 ...
A year before becoming a full professor at Harvard University, 31-year-old Graham Allison published Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Little, Brown, 1971), a book that swiftly and significantly altered our understanding of how policy decisions are executed. Today ...
In the run-up to their third and final debate on October 22nd, the theme of which is foreign policy, President Obama and Governor Romney will likely attempt to portray themselves as strong leaders who’re deeply committed to American exceptionalism and preeminence. November 6th, however, shouldn’t ...
Although Zbigniew Brzezinski “talks in paragraphs, virtually without pause,” according to a recent profile of him in the Financial Times, those paragraphs don’t meander; he gets to the point—fast. When I joked that he conveys more substance in ten minutes (actually, closer to eight) than many ...
Bloomberg recently asked me a few questions about the evolving role and capacity of the United Nations. With the 67th session of the UN General Assembly underway, I wanted to share my answers and ask folks how they’d respond. (1) Where does the UN fit in the 21st-century world? It remains a ...
As a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Government Department in the early 1960s, Joe Nye asked whether Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda would be able to forge an East African Common Market (he correctly predicted that they wouldn’t be able to do so). Roughly half a century later, he’s probably best known for ...
Roger Cohen recently argued that despite “the enduring centrality of American power” and “the nation’s immense capacity for renewal,” “even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China.” Cohen’s statement isn’t one of fatalism, but rather, of realism. In ...
There’s growing concern that tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea could escalate into a military confrontation between China and its neighbors—a confrontation, many argue, that would inexorably draw in the United States. Bonnie Glaser, a leading figure on U.S.-China relations ...
The past few years have been tough on economics and economists. In a searing indictment written one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Paul Krugman concluded that the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach ...
In a piece about the Barclays traders who colluded to fix the London interbank offered rate (LIBOR), the Economist declared that the LIBOR scandal “could well be global finance’s ‘tobacco moment’….[It is imperative] to change the way finance is run—and the culture of banking.” Perhaps because ...
When asked last Tuesday what he considered to be the “greatest threat” to U.S. national security, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, replied: I try not to pin myself or the country down in that regard….We live today under the threat of global terrorism….Cyber ...
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued some of the more memorable ones: Rio+20’s failure to make headway is an ...