Suchergebnisse

A regime's pitiless slaughter of civilians, particularly in an urbanized middle-class country close to Europe, drives segments of the public on both sides of the left-right divide to demand that something be done to quell the killing. When, as in the case of Syria, the regime cannot be shamed, has financial and materiel reserves and backup funding and troops from powerful allies, and has no higher ideal than self-preservation—when, in other words, it is immune to diplomatic and economic pressure—demands for responsive action quickly translate into demands for the use of force, whether direct or by proxy. and because in these enlightened times the projection of force across national borders is widely felt to be legally problematic, determining an appropriate reaction to the slaughter becomes a task for lawyers, no less than strategists.

Modern welfare liberalism is an evangelical faith, an identity with its own values, practices, and collective memory of battles won and lost. Because one of those values is tolerance and because the human rights to which liberalism gives political expression include the rights of cultural minorities, it is also a formula for peaceful coexistence among faiths, including its own. Paradoxically, the formula is under greater stress in Europe, where liberalism is virtually a state religion, than in the United States where important elements of liberal policy face powerful opponents. The stress seems more a function of economic stagnation than a clash between a minority's patriarchal traditions and the legacy inhabitants' easy-going post-modern hedonism.

A large proportion of the world's population depends existentially on the water (and waterpower) of one or more of the globe's major transnational river systems. By virtue of its transnational flow, each system has acquired a set of intergovernmental understandings varying in formality and degree of institutionalization and subject to ongoing practice and discourse. For the most part, those understandings have sufficiently structured discourse and practice to keep competition for water from becoming headline threats to international peace and security. This relatively felicitous condition seems unlikely to endure principally in the Global South where three powerful forces are bound to impose increasingly severe strains on the extant understandings. Adapted from the source document.