A blog for the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
On Sept. 6, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the 45-nation body that regulates the sale of nuclear fuel and technology, adopted a landmark decision authorizing cooperation with India on peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This India-specific decision largely completes a politically charged, often controversial process kicked in more than three years ago by India and the United States. Largely, because the U.S. Congress still has to approve the bilateral 123 Agreement for civil nuclear commerce between India and the United States. However, all the international aspects of this understanding--a plan to separate India's military and civil nuclear facilities, an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to safeguard designated civilian facilities and now an exemption to NSG rules that govern global nuclear commerce--are in place. India has also negotiated bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreements with France and Russia that theoretically can be operationalized right away. Nonetheless, out of deference to the United States, which has done most of the heavy lifting on this issue, India is expected to wait out the congressional process although the possible disadvantaging of U.S. companies is likely to encourage approval. Read more »
Submitted by Amandeep Gill on September 12, 2008 - 2:52pm
Kazakhstan's Sustainable Development Fund Kazyna and Presidential
Administration
Just look at the number of construction cranes around you
and you’ll immediately know that you have landed in a petrostate. What’s
special about the Caspian oil giant Kazakhstan is the fact that there
are two types of cranes—the idle ones and the busy ones. This becomes nowhere
more apparent than in the country’s new capital Astana. The idle cranes stand
on private construction sites and the busy ones on public construction sites. Read more »
Submitted by Christine Jojarth on July 2, 2008 - 9:27am
Commencement Speech to the International Relations Program
Larry Diamond, Stanford University, June 15, 2008
Good afternoon, and to our graduating seniors, congratulations. You have fulfilled the requirements for a demanding major at one of the world’s greatest universities, and you have done amazing things along the way, both in the classroom and outside it. In the study and research you have done outside the U.S., you have helped to globalize Stanford University, and it is only by becoming a truly global university that Stanford can retain and enhance its leadership in this new century. Your families and friends—and not least, your professors—rightly feel immensely proud of you.
As International Relations majors, you have gained special insights into the rapidly changing shape of our world, as it grows smaller, faster, smarter, richer, and more densely connected. I want to ponder with you five big changes that are transforming this world—changes you will need to confront, and I hope re-shape.
Read more »
Submitted by Larry Diamond on June 15, 2008 - 4:06pm
“You should remove ‘agricultural worker’ from the list of options of parents’ occupations in Question 11,” said the senior government bureaucrat. He explained, “It is impossible for the child of a farm laborer to enter an engineering college.” That statement was made on May 8 in Delhi this year, while he – the chief advisor on higher education to the national government – reviewed a questionnaire for final year engineering students. The questionnaire is to be filled by the graduating cohort of engineering students at various Indian universities this coming year. Its purpose is to discover job mobility across generations and relate that to the cost of education, location, public versus private provision, and various other factors. It is part of a broader study supported by FSI that colleagues at Stanford University and I, along with research groups in India, China and Russia, have initiated to compare the quality of the engineering workforce in three countries – China, India and Russia – with each other and with the United States. Read more »
Submitted by Rafiq Dossani on May 28, 2008 - 2:15pm
During the 2004 general election campaign, former Secretary of Defense William Perry—one of the great public servants in the post-World War II history of the United States—actively campaigned for a presidential candidate for the first time. Speaking repeatedly and passionately on behalf of John Kerry, the normally understated Perry described the 2004 election as “the most important in my lifetime.” For a man who had grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, who had reached professional maturity and brilliant engineering and business success during the Cold War, and then had served as undersecretary of defense in the Carter Administration, it was a powerful statement—and a completely honest one. The Iraq war had been a disastrous mistake and we had to find a way out. Our moral authority and military strength in the world were being squandered. Our domestic problems were piling up and we needed a new sense of purpose, clarity, and resolve to address them. The president that was seeking reelection showed no sign of understanding the nature n its resilience and its capacity for eventual self-correction.
Read more »
Submitted by Larry Diamond on May 9, 2008 - 9:31pm
What to do about Mexico's oil company, Pemex, may seem like a
parochial issue of interest only to Mexicans and a few oil industry
executives. But the matter should be of concern to anybody who is
wondering when oil will come down off its near-record highs.
Pemex
generates two fifth's of the Mexican government's income and is a
lucrative employer, but it is ailing from neglect. For years the
government has milked Pemex of cash without giving it the wherewithal
to invest in and develop new sources of oil. When President Felipe
Calderon proposed last week to reform Pemex and encourage more private
investment in oil exploration and refining, his leftist opponents shut
down the country's legislature in protest. Pemex, they claimed, is a
cherished national treasure that must not be pushed into private hands. Read more »
Submitted by David Victor on April 23, 2008 - 1:04pm
A boy walks past U.S. soldiers from the Alpha Troop, 3-89 CAV during a patrol in Baghdad's Fadhil district, April 16, 2008. REUTERS/Erik de Castro (IRAQ)After the exhausting and dispiriting testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to Congress this week, it is now even more starkly apparent that we are stuck in Iraq with no exit strategy. The plan of the Bush Administration, and of these military and diplomatic leaders, is still to “stay the course” and hope things will finally take hold in Iraq: hope that the competing Iraqi parties and factions will finally settle their biggest political differences; hope that the Iraqi Army will finally show the ability to face down threats to security and hold the country together; hope that “strategic patience” will eventually allow us to draw down our forces to a level that will not stretch the U.S. Army to the breaking point. But as a group of mid-level American military officers who served in Iraq observed in a devastating edited volume of this name, “Hope is Not a Plan.”
Read more »
Submitted by Larry Diamond on April 10, 2008 - 10:12am
FSI In The World is a new blog about FSI scholars' activities "in the world," whether it's monitoring elections overseas, advising policymakers in Washington DC, doing field research, or reaching out through online technology. Read more »
Submitted by Heather Boynton on February 15, 2008 - 11:55am