How I Invented the Peace Corps (Sort Of)

September 2018

by Gerald Kamens One morning in March 1959, a top secret policy paper appeared on my boss’s desk at Dwight Eisenhower’s Bureau of the Budget—later reborn as the Office of Management and Budget. Its subject: How to counter the Soviet … Read more

Nuggets of Wisdom

October 2017

Review by Brenda Brown Schoonover A Review of Saved for a Purpose: A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values, By  James A. Joseph. (Duke University Press, 235 pages ) The author, James A. Joseph defines his book,Saved for a Purpose: A Journey from Private Virtues … Read more

World War Two Provides the Indo/British Breaking Point

January 2017

Essay by Jon Dorschner “India at War” (The Subcontinent and the Second World War) by Yasmin Khan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-975349-9, 416 pp., $29.95 (Hardcover). India’s War (World War II and the Making of Modern … Read more

Why the Peace Corps?

January 2017

by John Coyne On this last day of 2016, I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about the creation of the Peace Corps–something positive to think about as we wait for 2017–and before all … Read more

Making Peace in Syria: Economic Diplomacy

January 2017

by Abdallah Al Dardari Aleppo is a landmark in the Syrian conflict and has become the strongest signal of the failure of the western approach to diplomacy and other means of influence to end the conflict. This failure calls for … Read more

The Myth of the Indian Middle Class

September 2015

by Jon P. Dorschner India is at an economic turning point. The resounding victory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 parliamentary elections has largely been viewed by observers as a ringing endorsement of economic … Read more

Making Aid Work by Building Strong Institutions

June 2015

 Observations on aid after over four decades of practicing development in Africa by Mark Wentling Abstract All agree that strong institutions are necessary for the achievement of lasting progress. It is widely recognized that strong institutions are essential for nation-building … Read more

Preserving the Rebalance to the Asia-Pacific Region

November 2014

By Thomas Donilon, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Text: http://www.cfr.org/china/keynote-address-obama-china-preserving-rebalance/p33778 Review by Francis P. Sempa, Contributing Editor Thomas Donilon of the Council on Foreign Relations spoke recently at the Brookings Institution about the Obama Administration’s rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region. … Read more