After hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two months, Julian Assange was granted asylum in Ecuador yesterday to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on charges of two counts of sexual assault. Assange wanted to take on the mightiest government in the world by publicizing massive …
U.S. government red tape is preventing American Iranians from sending much-needed aid to the thousands of victims of Saturday’s two earthquakes in northern Iran, aid organizations say. The earthquake killed 300 people and injured thousands in northern Iran. Food and material aid are desperately needed, but aid organizations are telling …
The two earthquakes that hit the northern Iranian town of Tabriz on Saturday—6.4 and 6.3 on the Richter scale—should prompt strong American support for the Iranian people. The contentious relationship between the government of Iran and the United States does not include the Iranian people. With more than 300 dead …
A newly published study by the American Security Project (ASP), “The New Public Diplomacy Imperative,” highlights public diplomacy (PD) as a crucial element of our national security strategy and details the many obstacles for U.S. public diplomacy to reach its potential. Over the past few decades, a new interest in …
In a recent speech to the American Security Project, Tara Sonenshine, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, laid out her vision for her tenure in office. “I always begin with, well, what is this nation about?” she said. Most people hesitate to go there, presumably for fear of offending this …
If ever a political assault on the media misfired, it has to be the appalling attack last Friday by White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer in the White House blog on Charles Krauthammer, one of Washington’s most highly respected newspaper columnists. Pfeiffer chastised Krauthammer scathingly for misstating the fact that …
Americans deserve transparency about what their government is doing, as long as that transparency doesn’t threaten national security. Transparency should also be the guiding principle of the State Department’s public diplomacy and U.S. international broadcasting. But since 1948, the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act, also know as the Smith–Mundt …
Even by U.S. government standards (not a high one these days), the State Department’s budget process is a mess. In almost every budget cycle, billions and billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars get allocated to the State Department in the last minute without proper congressional debate or substantive hearings. As a …
