Mr. Diplomat

November 17, 2009Angie G50

Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

Standing more than 6 feet tall in his black wingtips, Ambassador Thomas Pickering looms over most of his interlocutors in much the same way as he towers over the landscape of U.S. foreign policy. Over the course of what the Washington Post has called "the most dazzling diplomatic career of his generation," Pickering has, among other things, helped to conclude successfully the Gulf War, contend with the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, face down death squads in El Salvador, and orchestrate U.S. relations with Russia through a staccato series of crises and meltdowns. Yet for all the superlatives attached to his name, Pickering remains — by choice, perhaps — a virtual unknown outside his profession. Here, in a May 1 conversation with FP Editor Moisés Naím, Pickering traces the trajectory of U.S. power from Cold Warrior to Benevolent Hegemon and offers his views on how that power has been wielded, shaped, expanded, and constrained.

Reinventing War

November 16, 2009Angie G50

Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

A terrorist operating out of a tent in Afghanistan may do more to spur change in the U.S. armed forces than several decades’ worth of blue-ribbon panels, commissions, reports, and initiatives on military reform. For even if the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines remain unsuited to taking the lead in disrupting shadowy terrorist networks, the sight of a passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon has once and for all replaced the vision of Soviet tanks bursting through Eastern Europe as the free world’s Nightmare Number One. Will fundamental changes in U.S. military strategy, tactics, and budgets follow? As fate would have it, Foreign Policy had long planned a roundtable discussion with FP Editor Moisés Naím and four of America’s most distinguished retired military leaders for September 12 — one day after the terrorist attacks on American soil. The participants’ cumulative 100-plus years of military experience include enforcing the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia, commanding the U.S. 6th Fleet, serving as deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command, and heading the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. Delivered in the heat of crisis, their prescriptions for responding to the attacks are thoughtful and wide ranging. And their views on everything from the obstacles to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s reform efforts and the amount of waste in the defense budget to the military’s remarkable technophobia are, in many ways, as unexpected as they are provocative.

On the Fence

November 13, 2009Angie G50

Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

Migration is as old as history. But the flow of humans across borders today versus that of centuries ago is about as similar as, say, the Mayflower and a shipping container. Roughly 150 million people now live outside their countries of birth. Alien smuggling is a $7 billion a year business. More than 12 million refugees crowd camps and shelters around the world. Regulating this global movement of people was hard even before terrorist attacks turned every border check into a paranoid pat-down. Just ask Doris Meissner, ex-commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), who spent seven years dealing with refugee crises, a schizophrenic Congress, and interest groups from the fans of Elián to the friends of Sikhs. And as Meissner pointed out in her conversation with FP Editor Moisés Naím in Washington on January 10, the only thing harder than agreeing on a sensible domestic migration policy is agreeing on a regional or — God forbid — a global one.

FOREIGN POLICY: Some observers have blamed last year’s terrorist attacks against the United States on lax U.S. immigration policies that allowed terrorists to enter the country and move about freely. U.S. Congressman Thomas Tancredo went so far as to conclude that the ins is "incompetent and incapable of protecting the people of the United States." What do you think?
Doris Meissner: To blame either our immigration policies or a single agency is just irresponsible, in my opinion.

The World According to Larry

November 11, 2009Angie G50

Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy

Larry Summers is to modesty what Madonna is to chastity," wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot in 1995. But if Summers is in fact an immodest man, he at least has much to be immodest about: one of the youngest full professors of economics at Harvard, winner of coveted awards from the National Science Foundation and the American Economics Association, former vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, former secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and now president of Harvard University. (He is also, in addition to his many other institutional affiliations, a member of FP‘s editorial board.) Along the way, Summers established a reputation as an inspirational teacher, injected a healthy pragmatism into an often-abstract social science, helped douse financial fires around the world, and — not least — alienated more than a few onlookers and colleagues with his take-no-prisoners brand of intellectual combat. Here, in a conversation with FP Editor Moisés Naím in May, Summers takes on his critics, offers his views on everything from the state of the global economy to distance learning, and explains how Larry Summers, the academic economist, learned to live with Larry Summers, the public servant.