Background on the News - 2006-04-05

A proposed change to French law that would make it easier for employers to fire (and thus hire) young employees has brought students into the streets and onto the barricades while causing political trouble for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Princeton's Sophie Meunier dissected French ambivalence about globalization in Foreign Affairs several years ago. She argued that the French resisted economic liberalization because they feared it would jeopardize the country's unique culture and traditions; add a national penchant for theatrical public protest and the stories almost write themselves.

• Full text of original essay (July/August 2000)

In the Current Issue of Foreign Affairs

The complete text of selected essays and of all the book reviews from the March/April issue can be found on the Foreign Affairs Web site. Currently the following essays are available in their full text:

Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq

by Paul R. Pillar

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon

Stephen Biddle

Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist "people's war," and so those lessons are not valid. "Iraqization," in particular, is likely to make matters worse, not better.

The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy

Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press

For four decades, relations among the major nuclear powers have been shaped by their common vulnerability, a condition known as mutual assured destruction. But with the U.S. arsenal growing rapidly while Russia's decays and China's stays small, the era of MAD is ending — and the era of U.S. nuclear primacy has begun.

The Man Without a Plan

Amartya Sen

In The White Man's Burden, William Easterly offers important insights about the pitfalls of foreign aid. Unfortunately, his overblown attack on global "do-gooders" obscures the real point: that aid can work, but only if done right.

Previously in Background on the News

Rights and Wrongs
March 22, 2006
Last week, the UN General Assembly voted to replace the controversial Human Rights Commission with a smaller Human Rights Council. Among the myriad criticisms of the now-defunct commission was that many member states, such as Libya and Sudan, served on the panel only in order to stifle debate about their own atrocious human-rights records. . . . Read more

Indian Spring
March 8, 2006
President George W. Bush's announcement last week that Washington will tolerate India's nuclear status has drawn fire from analysts who fear the move could undermine nonproliferation efforts everywhere. . . . Read more

To Be or Not To Be
February 22, 2006
Seven years after the end of the war in Kosovo, the terrority's final status is still up in the air. Formal negotiations about independence for the semi-autonomous province of the federation known as Serbia and Montenegro resume this week, but it is unclear where the talks (among representatives of Serbia, Kosovo, the United States, NATO, and the UN) will lead. . . . Read more

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