Word: america
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Most foreign policy books are ... avoidable. They tend to be written in an abstruse language that occasionally approaches English. The most commercial of them promise a new theory of the world: it is flat (economically), America's influence is waning (or waxing), the nature of power is changing, growing softer, more multilateral (or unilateral). Gelb takes a defiant step in the opposite direction, away from gimmicks and grand theories, toward a re-examination of the most basic and eternal tool in the game of nations. He does not dispute that the world has changed: globalization exists, as do Osama...
Gelb is at his best describing the three "demons" that render America's politicians congenitally foolish and unable to project power creatively - our tendency to turn principles into dogma, domestic political pressures, and the delusion that America can do anything. George W. Bush was badly boggled by all three. His "Freedom Agenda," which wantonly promoted democracy, led to disasters like the rise of Hamas in Gaza (after Bush forced elections that neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority wanted). Bush also played domestic tough-guy politics disgracefully: his opponents were inevitably "soft on terrorism." And he played the darker avenues...
...historians will long argue about the relative impact of trade restrictions - led by the U.S. Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 - on the scale of the Great Depression. The U.S. economy was much less integrated into a global economic system then than it is now. But given the retaliation from America's trading partners after the new tariffs were applied, few would argue with Zoellick's assessment that the contraction of trade in the 1930s made the long downturn worse than it needed to be. "Protectionism," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told TIME recently, "is the road to ruin...
...foreigners than, say, a decade ago, they "won't speak to journalists without permission," says Lankov. Even at the joint South and North Korean industrial complex at Kaesong, just north of the Demilitarized Zone, journalists don't really expect to land interviews with regular North Koreans, says Voice of America's Kurt Achin, who was part of a press tour there about two years ago. (See pictures of the reportedly ailing Kim Jong Il, doctored by his government...
...clear how much political capital this incident will cost China and the U.S. America has extricated its citizens from North Korea in the past, so Ling and Lee should make it home eventually. One thing is for sure: their misadventure will make it an even more daunting task for journalists to learn about the lives of ordinary North Koreans...