Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

A Southern gambler hunts a killer in the thick of the first great battle of the Civil War. It's July 1861, and both the Union and Confederate armies expect to win the war within 24 hours. For Harrison Raines, a Southern dandy ensconced in DC society, it's time to choose a side. Though Raines loves Virginia, he hates slavery with a passion. And joining either army would mean leaving Washington and deserting the beautiful Caitlin Howard.

The historic nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 negotiators announced on July 14 is a transformative event for the Middle East, a victory for U.S. nonproliferation strategy, and will surely be one of U.S. President Barack Obama’s most consequential foreign policy achievements.

The latest idea de jour on how the next US administration should deal with Iran, trumpeted especially by the Hillary Clinton camp, is the need to be tougher and more aggressive in confronting Tehran. Only a stiff spine in standing up to the mullahcracy, as the argument goes, will block its expansionist desires and prevent a rising Iran from dominating the region.

Should the United States commit its unrivaled power to spreading democracy and cementing Washington’s leadership of the liberal international order? Or would U.S. interests be better served by less American intervention in world affairs—and, in particular, by less exertion of U.S. military force? Two recent books seek to persuade Americans to reconsider the advantages of more actively exercising U.S. power and military force.

Donald Trump’s admirers and critics would probably agree on one thing: he is different. One of his chief Republican supporters, Newt Gingrich, describes him as a "unique, extraordinary experience." And of course, in some ways - his celebrity, his flexibility with the facts - Trump is unusual. But in an important sense, he is not: Trump is part of a broad populist upsurge running through the Western world. It can be seen in countries of widely varying circumstances, from prosperous Sweden to crisis-ridden Greece.

Between 1996 and 2011, I served as a consultant to the Kremlin, advising Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev. And yet even I can hardly claim to understand the real mechanisms of power in today’s Russia. In the past few years, the country has reached a level of dysfunction that has pushed it to the brink, threatening its very existence.

Chinese policymakers have been making a push to internationalize the renminbi but, if they want it to displace the dollar, they will have to move much faster on a set of broad economic and regulatory reforms and take a less centralized approach to economic policymaking.

Marijuana, once considered worthy of condemnation, has in recent years become a "medicine", legalized fully in four states, with others expected to follow. But the dangers are clear. According to Bennett's research, more Americans are admitted to treatment facilities for marijuana use than for any other illegal drug. Studies have shown a link between marijuana use and abnormal brain structure and development.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, talks to Foreign Affairs about American competitiveness, creative disruption, and why he runs into the office every morning.

For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. By 1900, it was the world’s fourth or fifth-largest industrial power and the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

Just because a US presidential candidate bashes free trade on the campaign trail does not mean that he or she cannot embrace it once elected. After all, Barack Obama voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement as a US senator and disparaged the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a presidential candidate. In office, however, he came to champion the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a giant trade deal with 11 other Pacific Rim countries.

Assessments of how governments and international organizations have dealt with global challenges often feature a familiar refrain: when it comes to funding, there was too little, too late. The costs of economic, social, and environmental problems compound over time, whether it’s an Ebola outbreak that escalates to an epidemic, a flood of refugees that tests the strength of the EU, or the rise of social inequalities that reinforce poverty. And yet governments and aid groups rarely prove able to act before such costs explode.

In profiling two leading figures in the German resistance, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern have revealed an important truth about the anti-Nazi underground: although those who opposed Hitler often had motives unrelated to anti-Semitism, the most influential resisters were driven primarily by a shared horror at the mass murder of Jews.

In the decade following the Cold War, democracy flourished around the world as never be-fore. In recent years, however, much of this progress has steadily eroded. Between 2000 and 2015, democracy broke down in 27 countries, among them Kenya, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey. Around the same time, several other global “swing states” - countries that, thanks to their large populations and economies, could have an outsize impact on the future of global democracy - also took a turn for the worse.

Why Washington's mideast pullback makes sense.

Cybersecurity expert Mark Sangster deftly weaves together real-life cases in a thrilling narrative that illustrates the human complexities behind the scenes that can lead to companies throwing their digital front doors open to criminals. Within a security context, deep social engineering is the newest and biggest means of breaching our systems. Sangster tells listeners that cybersecurity is not an IT problem to solve - it is a business risk to manage.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the United States was being taken advantage of by its trading partners. Bad trade deals, he said, were to blame for lost jobs and deepening trade deficits. Yet he never laid out in detail what he intended to do about it—and his trade policy as president has been nothing if not haphazard. The midterm elections provide a good moment to take stock of Trump’s trade agenda: what has he done so far and what might he do next?

As China asserts itself in its nearby seas and Russia wages war in Syria and Ukraine, it is easy to assume that Eurasia’s two great land powers are showing signs of newfound strength. But the opposite is true: increasingly, China and Russia flex their muscles not because they are powerful but because they are weak. Unlike Nazi Germany, whose power at home in the 1930s fueled its military aggression abroad, today’s revisionist powers are experiencing the reverse phenomenon.

How to understand the economic impact of migration.

As surprising as the recent financial crisis and recession were, the behavior of the world’s industrialized economies and financial markets during the recovery has been even more so. 
Most observers expected the unusually deep recession to be followed by an unusually rapid recovery, with output and employment returning to trend levels relatively quickly.