Publications

Delivering her Nobel Lecture after a 21-year delay, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi offered a timely reminder from the front lines of struggle.

“To be forgotten,” she said in her October 16th address in Oslo, “… is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out, ‘Don’t forget us!’ They meant: ‘Don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.’

"Life," the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, "must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards."

What's true of individuals is true of nations. As we, as a nation, look back in an effort to understand our history, we invariably question some of the decisions we made -- and the horror we tolerated.

Nearly 40 years ago, a Congress disgusted with the value-less foreign policy realism of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford began to require the State Department to report each year on the human rights records of other countries.

Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program.

To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other "P5+1" negotiators - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - want a deal.