The last time I mentioned the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi was November. Since that time, republicans have continued to call into question the administration’s response to the incident, accusing them of having covered up the fact that the attack on the embassy was an assault by extremists rather than, as was initially believed, a spontaneous outgrowth of a protest against an anti-Islamic video. One of the primary casualties of this ongoing discussion was Susan Rice‘s bid to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Now, Hillary Clinton has taken the stand to defend the actions of the state department to congress. Her response was sufficiently interest that I decided, one last time, to make the Benghazi incident the focal point of a post.
Category: International Relations
France Goes to War
French President François Hollande has decided that France is going into Mali. The nation of Mali has, in the last year, descended into civil war. The war in Mali has received relatively little mainstream media coverage and many westerners are, to our collective shame, unaware of what has been going on there and the role their own governments have played in creating the war. Today I would like to examine the Malian Civil War, its causes, the present state of affairs, and the ethics of intervening in it.
Communist in Name Only: China’s Rising Inequality
The official name is the People’s Republic of China, in case you might forget. You’d be forgiven of course–today’s China does not look much like a “people’s” anything. Increasingly socially and economically stratified, China’s one-party system is about the full extent of its communist or socialist leanings. Or at least, so it seems if you believe a new study out from a Chinese university in Chengdu, which puts China’s Gini coefficient at an utterly ridiculous 0.61.
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Territorial Disputes and the Future of Asia
It has been in and out of the corner of the western press’s eye the last few years. China has been flexing its muscle in Asia, attempting to press claims to territory, both land and sea, on its various borders. This has not gone unnoticed by China’s neighbours, who are quite furious with China over some of its more belligerent acts. The matter has been simmering, off and on, for some time. What I find most interesting about it, however, is how this dispute has set the nations of Asia against each other, dividing it between two sides, one pro-China, the other against.
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The Foreign Policy Borg
One of the most common criticisms of Obama from the left is that his foreign policy is not discernibly all that different from that of late period George W. Bush–Guantanamo was never closed, Obama employed a surge strategy in Afghanistan, drone attacks were used, troop numbers continued to decline in Iraq, it all felt, and perhaps it all feels, as though nothing has changed. At the same time, many on the left like to argue that, were Kerry or Gore elected, things would have been quite different, that Bush was discernibly distinct from Clinton. The historical record shows this to be false–Bush’s foreign policy amounted to a mere evolution of Clinton’s military interventionism and embrace of the democratic peace theory, the notion that democracies promote peace and prosperity and that, consequently, democracy should be spread to foreign lands. It’s not as if the interventions in Somalia and Yugoslavia during the nineties were motived in any way significantly differently from the reasoning eventually supplied for the occupation of Iraq–spreading freedom, ending tyranny, and so on down the line. Of course, when these people were running for office, they talked a different game. They tried to draw distinction from their predecessors and purported to offer a serious foreign policy alternative–Mitt Romney as we recall attempted this very line of argument. So why is it that our presidents get assimilated into the foreign policy borg and adopt policies that are, for the most part, quite similar to those adopted by their predecessors? That’s today’s topic of investigation.
Benjamin Studebaker 