Showing papers in "Foreign Affairs in 2013"

Where Have All the Workers Gone

Abstract: Assuming for argument sake there is a skills shortage, what are we to make of this seeming paradox? Despite the denials of Government, the persistent unemployment and underemployment that has plagued Australia for the last 30 years and any existence of skill shortages represent two-sides of the same coin. They both reflect a lack of governance at the Federal level. At the top of the growth cycle, this lack of governance manifests as skill shortages with persistently high unemployment, whereas at other times it takes the form of very high labour underutilisation and rising long-term unemployment. Both manifestations are the result of erroneous Federal Government macroeconomic policy.

The Lost Logic of Deterrence

Abstract: Deterrence isn't what it used to be. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was the backbone of U.S. national security. Its purpose, logic, and effectiveness were well understood. It was the essential military strategy behind containing the Soviet Union and a crucial ingredient in winning the Cold War without fighting World War III. But in recent decades, deterrence has gone astray, and U.S. defense policy is worse for the change.

The Unruled World

Abstract: While campaigning for president in 2008, Barack Obama pledged to renovate the dilapidated multilateral edifice the United States had erected after World War II. He lionized the generation of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and George Marshall for creating the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and NATO. Their genius, he said, was to recognize that “instead of constraining our power, these institutions magnified it.” But the aging pillars of the postwar order were creaking and crumbling, Obama suggested, and so “to keep pace with the fast-moving threats we face,” the world needed a new era of global institution building.

How Big Business Can Save the Climate Multinational Corporations Can Succeed Where Governments Have Failed

Abstract: ROGER HAYTER is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. and technological support. The treaty’s main targets, however, were companies. By preventing the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances within countries, as well as the trade of those substances between countries, the treaty gave multinational corporations a clear and short deadline to "nd substitutes for the chemicals or face being forced out of the world market. The results were dramatic: the companies responded to the pressure by developing alternative methods, going a long way toward solving the problem at its root. Unfortunately, this success has not been matched when it comes to the world’s greatest collective challenge: stopping climate change. For 20 years, national governments have sought to slow the heating of the planet and the rise of the oceans by apportioning blame and attempting to spread the "nancial burden. The vehicle for their e#orts, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is a negotiating process aimed at getting countries to commit to reducing their emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the main cause of global warming. But the UNFCCC has (oundered because of disagreements between developed and developing countries; di)culties in credibly measuring, reporting, and verifying emissions reductions; and the power of vested interests in the energy sector. Above all, the UNFCCC has failed because it does not provide powerful enough directives for companies to develop and use technologies that could radically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike the Montreal Protocol, the UNFCCC does not focus on speci"c internationally traded products that How Big Business Can Save the Climate

The Coming Arctic Boom

Abstract: The ice was never supposed to melt this quickly. Although climate scientists have known for some time that global warming was shrinking the percentage of the Arctic Ocean that was frozen over, few predicted so fast a thaw. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that Arctic summers would become ice free beginning in 2070. Yet more recent satellite observations have moved that date to somewhere around 2035, and even more sophisticated simulations in 2012 moved the date up to 2020. Sure enough, by the end of last summer, the portion of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice had been reduced to its smallest size since record keeping began in 1979, shrinking by 350,000 square miles (an area equal to the size of Venezuela) since the previous summer. All told, in just the past three decades, Arctic sea ice has lost half its area and three quarters of its volume.

How Syria's Civil War Became a Holy Crusade

Abstract: A Pandora's box was opened in the Middle East in late May. That was when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian theologian who is perhaps the world's most influential Sunni cleric, called on Sunni Muslims worldwide to fight against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah in Syria. In the weeks and months ahead, Qaradawi's statement will surely quicken the stream of foreign fighters into Syria. Before long, Syria's civil war could turn into an all-out sectarian conflict involving the entire region.