British Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to hold an in-out referendum on British membership of the European Union by 2017. This is a very bad idea. Here’s why.
Category: International Relations
Concerning the relations of states to each other and to the wider world in general.
Clinton on Benghazi
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.
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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Benjamin Studebaker 