President Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out …
The past week has seen the publication of two important studies on the virtues of smaller government by our friends in the United Kingdom. Neither paper is short, and both are technical in places, but they are both analytically careful and important contributions to the most important debate of our …
Iran once again has refuted optimistic predictions that meaningful progress would be made on the core issues at stake in the on-again, off-again nuclear negotiations. In two days of talks in Baghdad, Tehran rejected the Western proposal for resolving the nuclear impasse and agreed only to continue the talks in …
Three days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sri Lankan Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris met in Washington, D.C., to discuss Sri Lanka’s human rights record, former Sri Lankan Army General Sarath Fonseka was released from prison. Fonseka is viewed as a war hero by the Sinhalese majority for his …
Syria’s “Arab Spring,” long delayed by barbaric repression, is now rapidly deteriorating into a bloody civil war. The Bashar al-Assad regime’s stubborn rejection of political compromise and its brutal suppression of the opposition has led increasing numbers of Syrians to take up arms against the regime. They have been joined …
The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), created in 1970 and based in Madrid, identifies itself as the “United Nations agency responsible for the promotion of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism.” It announced last year that Zambia and Zimbabwe jointly “won the bid” to host the 20th session of …
Controversy has swirled around the Smith–Mundt Modernization Act since it passed mark-up as an amendment to the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act last Friday. Smith–Mundt has prohibited U.S. citizens from accessing the public diplomacy products of the U.S. government, whether in print or on the airwaves, since 1948. Critics on the left …
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has long been Iran’s greatest ally in the Western Hemisphere, but as Chavez’s cancer grows and his country’s future becomes increasingly uncertain, Iran may need to find a new best friend in Latin America—and fast. Enter Bolivia. Since Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first visited Bolivia in 2007, …
In a speech at Disney World’s Cinderella Castle earlier this year, President Obama declared that “America is open for business.” For many, however, his declaration was little more than empty words. As a citizen of Brazil living here in Washington, D.C., I have experienced the tremendous hurdles that visitors to …
