Global Governance Initiative: Latest Articles

Globalization has become so synonymous with our contemporary, interconnected existence that the word hardly merits usage anymore.

The diplomatic and military surge into South-Central Asia that will define the Obama administration's early years has already begun. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Centcom head Gen. David Petraeus have become regular visitors to Islamabad and Kabul. Vice President Joe Biden recently came through for huddled conversations, and veteran Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke has just embarked on his first trip as special envoy to the region. Enough congressional delegations are passing through that the Pakistani media

Even if an additional 30,000 American and NATO troops were deployed in southern and eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban problem would not be reduced. It would merely be pushed back over the Pakistan border, destabilizing Pakistan's already volatile North-West Frontier Province, which itself is more populous than Iraq. This amounts to squeezing a balloon on one end to inflate it on the other.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to appoint the world's first governmental Chief Technology Officer (CTO). On its transition Web site, www.change.gov, the incoming Administration has published a list of goals for the soon-to-be anointed CTO: broadband expansion, boosting science/tech education, health-care computerization, patent reform, and e-government.

These days it is not fashionable to speak of empires, which are considered to be aggressive, mercantilist relics supposedly consigned to the dustbin of history with post-World War II decolonization and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many then predicted that ethnic self-determination would drag the world into a new era of political fragmentation as the number of countries proliferated from fewer than 50 at the end of World War II to, potentially, hundreds in the 21st century, with every minority getting its own state, currency, and… more