Archives for September 2017

Trump’s new travel ban has one historic precedent: The Chinese Exclusion Act

The Trump administration this week announced sweeping new restrictions on travelers from eight countries:  Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen

Days later, the administration formally established that the United States will take in no more than 45,000 refugees fleeing conflict around the world. This is a record-low cap on the number of refugees that the United States has ever resettled since 1980. To put this in context, the previous cap authorized by President Obama was 110,000.

The travel ban and refugee cap are two separate policies, but they are related, at least politically, in the eyes of this administration.

With the exception of Venezuela, in which only government officials are targeted, the travel ban prevents nearly any national from these countries from obtaining a visa to visit, live, study or work in the United States. According to my podcast guest Mark Hetfield, there is only one historic precedent for this: the 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was an explicitely racists law barring all Chinese migration to the United States

Hetfield is President of HIAS–a jewish non-profit organization that is one of nine American agencies that resettles refugees in the United States.

In this episode, Mark discusses the travel ban, its implications for people both in the United States and abroad and also his organization’s new legal strategy to confront this travel ban. We also discuss at length this new refugee cap, which is an unprecedented abrogation of the traditional American approach to refugee admissions.

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Episode 165: Meghan O’Sullivan

Meghan O’Sullivan is the author of the new book Windfall: How the new energy abundance upends global politics and strengthens American power.  We kick off this episode with a discussion of the ways in which the natural gas boom in the United States is changing international diplomacy and geopolitics. It’s fascinating stuff!

O’Sullivan is the Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and has had a career in government and the think tank world. She served, for a time, as the deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration and she was one of the first American civilian officials on the ground in Baghdad after the city fell to US forces in 2003. We discuss these events and more–including being mentored by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

This conversation covers the geopolitics of energy, the US occupation of Iraq, and Meghan O’Sullivan’s career as an international relations scholar and practitioner.

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What to Expect at the UN General Assembly

World leaders gather at the United Nations this week for the annual summit at the United Nations General Assembly. This is always one of the big highlights of the international diplomatic calendar and it will be all the more interesting this year for the fact that President Trump is making his UN debut.

So what should expect from Trump at UNGA? What are some of the big issues on the diplomatic agenda in New York this week? How much oxygen will the US President suck from the room? On the line to discuss these questions and more is Richard Gowen, fellow at the European Council.

We also discuss key issues — beyond Trump — that will drive the conversations this week, including the crises in North Korea and Myanmar, how Antonio Guterres his first UNGA as Secretary General and what to expect from Emmanuel Macron’s debut.

This is a useful preview of some of the key issues of substance and style that will drive the global conversation in New York this week. It will be useful to both UN-nerds and general international relations enthusiasts alike.

If you have 30 minutes and want get learn what this UNGA is all about, have a listen.

Can Trump and the United Nations Just Get Along? — Richard Gowan  

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Ethnic Cleansing is Ongoing Against the Rohingya of Myanmar. Here is how to stop it

 

Rohingya refugees trudge through the rain and mud as they arrive at Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh after days on foot. Photo: UNHCR/Vivian Tan

Nearly 400,000 ethnic Rohingya have fled Myanmar across the border to Bangladesh and that number is increasing by the day. Those who have fled have relayed stories of horrific violence being inflicted against this minority community by their government.

Since late August, security forces from the government of Myanmar (also called Burma) have attacked villages and towns in a seemingly coordinated fashion to create a massive displacement crisis. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has described what is happening a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” At a press conference yesterday, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres concurred.

“When one-third of the Rohingya population has got to flee the country, can you find a better word to describe it?” he asked.

On the line with me to discuss this current crisis is John Sifton, the advocacy director Human Rights Watch-Asia. We spoke just after he got off the phone with his colleagues on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border who have witnessed profound scenes of destruction. Sifton describes satellite imagery he’s reviewed that depicts towns, villages and neighborhoods being burned to the ground.

This episode provides a useful background on the plight of the Rohingya population in Burma and explains why Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the de-facto leader of the country, has been unable or unwilling to stop this onslaught against a minority community in her country. Sifton offers some good suggestions on how the international community might best respond to this unfolding crisis.

If you are regular listener to the show, you know that I have done several episodes on this issue–which is one of those under-the-radar global issues that I like to highlight on the podcast. Now, of course the situation is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

If you have twenty minutes and want a deeper understanding of what this campaign of ethnic cleansing against looks like — and how to stop it — have a listen.

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Episode 164: John Shattuck

John Shattuck is the former US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, former President of the Central European University, and served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy Human Rights and Labor During the Clinton administration.  He is currently a professor at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts

John was deep in the policy debates over the US response to the Rwanda genocide and explains how and why the United States failed to mount a meaningful response to this crisis. John also played a key role in uncovering the genocide at Srebrenica in which some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were murdered by Serb forces, and he explains how he came to help uncover this crime.

John is a board member of Humanity in Action and we kick off this conversation discussing the situation in Poland and Hungary, where pluralist values and civic institutions have come under extreme threat by right wing governments. W discuss how civic organizations and universities can push back against this creeping illiberalism.

This is a great talk with someone who has had a fascinating career standing up for civil liberties and human rights in the United States and around the world.

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Can the International Community Do Hurricane Response Better?

Credit: Jill Carlson via Flickr/CC License

 

With Houston still reeling from Hurricane Harvey, Irma causing massive havoc in the Caribbean, and more storms on the way, I thought it would be timely and interesting to speak with my guest today, Maria Ivanova

Maria Ivanova is an academic who straddles the university and policy worlds to help think through the connections between human security, environmental stresses and global governance–that is, the mechanisms that the international community and beyond have designed to deal with environmental challenges.

In this conversation she helps put the onslaught of these hurricanes into a kind of broader global context that addresses how the international community might more productively organize itself to confront the realities of climate change.

Maria is a Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston.

She is also Ambassador for the New Shape Prize of the Global Challenges Foundation. This is a $5 million prize that will be awarded next year to “the best ideas that re-envision global governance for the 21st century.”  Toward the end of this conversation we discuss what exactly that means.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn how the international community can better approach storms, disasters, climate change, then have a listen.

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Episode 163: Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. She is also the author of the new book Madame President: The extraordinary journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf which is a biography of the Liberian president and Nobel Peace Prize winner was was Africa’s first female head of state.

Helene was born and raised in Liberia. Her family fled to the United States in 1980, when she was 13-years-old, following a coup. Her immediate family was brutally targeted during this coup.

She describes the trauma around these events, and the search for her sister with whom she became separated during this time in her critically acclaimed book, The House on Sugar Beach: In search of a Lost African Childhood.

Helene discusses some of these experiences in our conversation and describes how a near-death experience covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 motivated her to go back to Liberia.

We kick off this conversation with a discussion of upcoming elections in Liberia and her newest book about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf before having a longer conversation about her experiences as a refugee to the United States and finding her long lost sister in Liberia.

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