Niall Ferguson & New at AP 15 Jun 2007 08:43 am
Two vignettes that say much about the American way of war. First, two trigger-happy reservist pilots making a lethal attack on a British armoured convoy during the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite indications that their targets were, in fact, their own allies.
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New at AP 15 Mar 2007 09:08 am
Anne L.H. Gantén
Executive Director
The Atlantic Partnership
Issues In the News 12 Mar 2007 06:33 pm
Newsweek’s Howard Fineman says the candidates for America’s Republican Party primary are trying to push away from President Bush and are branding themselves as “Mr. Fix-Its.”
Issues In the News 11 Mar 2007 06:35 pm
WASHINGTON: Both U.S. and Iranian diplomats Sunday cautiously welcomed as an important “first step” the results of the regional meeting in Baghdad that brought a rare face-to-face encounter between the two sides.
New at AP 04 Mar 2007 11:50 am
Chaos theory proposes that, by merely flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle, a single butterfly can cause a hurricane in the Home Counties. That is because of the extraordinary complexity of the global climatic system: one tiny bit of turbulence in darkest Brazil can, under the right circumstances, trigger a kind of meteorological chain reaction, the ultimate effect of which is out of all proportion to the initial cause.
The scientists have a great phrase for this: “stochastic behaviour in a deterministic system”. What it means is that every particle in the earth’s atmosphere is linked in a chain of cause and effect so intricate that it is extremely hard to make accurate predictions about the behaviour of the system as whole. The weather forecast for tomorrow may be reasonably accurate. But the weather forecast for next week will be much less so. And every now and then an apparently random whirlwind will catch even the weatherman out, as happened in the “hurricane” of 1987.
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Niall Ferguson & New at AP 19 Feb 2007 05:53 pm
By Ronald Asmus
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bellicose speech at the Munich security conference on Feb. 10 has caused some to revive their arguments against enlarging NATO. The policy was wrongheaded because it produced the nationalist policies that emanate from Moscow today, they say. NATO expansion was a bad idea, they argue, because it enraged the Russians and prompted them to elect a former KGB officer and cold warrior as president. The only thing we got out of NATO enlargement, they say, was the Czech navy.
The critics were wrong when they opposed adding nations to the alliance in the 1990s, and they are still wrong. In fact, the more time that passes, the better the arguments in favor of enlargement look. There were basically three reasons for expanding NATO, and each has been proved right.
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