Funny stuff from Slate's Chris Beam here, in a piece about Obama's new ambassadors:

Louis Susman, a retired vice chairman of Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, was nominated ambassador to Britain. (Fundraising for Obama: more than $500,000.) Former financial analyst Charles Rivkin ($100,000 to $200,000) will be America's man in Paris. And biotech lawyer John Roos (more than $500,000) will relocate to Tokyo. [...]

No doubt the new political appointees can handle the job. Roos, as CEO of a global, technology-focused law firm, understands trade issues likely to arise in Japan. Rivkin has international experience as a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. And Obama's appointee to Great Britain, Louis Susman, speaks fluent English.

Heh. The truth is that there is indeed much doubt about whether Roos is the best man for the job, as the Japan Times reports:

Roos is almost unknown among U.S. and Japanese officials and experts. Because he has no diplomatic and security experience, some doubt has been raised about his qualifications at a time when North Korea's nuclear and missile threats are mounting.

The choice of Roos, described as a "virtually unknown lawyer," is creating some angst in Tokyo:

Yoshimitsu Nishikawa, a professor of international relations at Toyo University, said the nomination is a "sign of Japan passing," and that Roos appears to lack diplomatic experience and is unlikely to be deeply knowledgeable about the Japan-U.S. relationship.

The Japanese press even has a dismissive term used to describe the Roos nomination and others like it: ronkokosho or "honoring past services," referring to the funding support Roos provided during the campaign.

See David Rothkopf's take for more.

When I registered last week to attend Dick Cheney's speech today, I already knew it was going to be a big event, but with President Obama's Guantanamo speech immediately preceding it and the ensuing "dueling speeches" hype, AEI's Wohlstetter Conference Center took on the atmosphere of a prize fight, complete with the obligatory famous (for D.C.) attendees.

We watched Obama's speech on an overhead projector and when it ended, I half expected the room to go dark for Cheney's introduction. (AEI president Arthur Brooks makes a somewhat unsatisfying Don King figure.)

The "duel" theme felt especially strange since Cheney's speech wasn't really a rebuttal to Obama's in any real sense. Cheney's prepared remarks were passed out before Obama's speech had even ended and except for a shortened introduction, he didn't deviate from them at all.

In some sense, it would have been nice to hear actual dueling speeches in which the former vice president would actual respond to the points Obama made. For instance, Cheney repeated this currently popular talking point:

Attorney General Holder and others have admitted that the United States will be compelled to accept a number of the terrorists here, in the homeland, and it has even been suggested US taxpayer dollars will be used to support them.  On this one, I find myself in complete agreement with many in the President’s own party. Unsure how to explain to their constituents why terrorists might soon be relocating into their states, these Democrats chose instead to strip funding for such a move out of the most recent war supplemental.

But Obama had already denounced this argument as a scare tactic and made this point: 

We will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders – highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety. As we make these decisions, bear in mind the following fact: nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal "supermax" prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists. 

I would have liked to hear Cheney's response to this point (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also can't be thrilled that Dick Cheney is now his highest profile ally in this fight).

As another example, Obama's point that "unlike the Civil War or World War II, we cannot count on a surrender ceremony to bring this journey to an end" was a fairly good rebuttal to Cheney's arument that because there has not been a repeat of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration's antiterrorism tactics should be "continued until the danger has passed." Of course, it's unlikely to ever be clear when the danger has passed, meaning that the extraordinary authority that Cheney believes the president should be afforded will only be afforded at the president's own discretion.

At the same time, Cheney made some points that it would have been enlightening to hear Obama respond to as well, such as the new study Cheney highlighted showing that one in seven released Guantanamo detainees returns to terrorism or his admonishment of the administration for revealing details of interrogation methods without releasing the information they were used to obtain.

But in the end, the "dueling speeches" set-up has to be counted as a victory for Obama. The format increased the attention paid to Cheney's speech and the fact that much of what Cheney said had already been answered by Obama, made the Republican position look out of touch with recent developments. The administration seems to have decided that the best way to make its case is to set up Dick Cheney as the face of the opposition. Still, a real debate between these two would have been pretty fascinating.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney are both giving national security speeches on Guantanamo Bay policy this morning -- Obama at 10:10 (he isn't on yet) and Cheney at 10:45. FP's Joshua Keating is at AEI to see Cheney, and he'll report back later today.

In the meantime, watch Obama streaming here and Cheney streaming here. 

Update: Here's the text of Obama's speech.

Tone-setting quote: 

On all of these matter related to the disclosure of sensitive information, I wish I could say that there is a simple formula. But there is not. These are tough calls involving competing concerns, and they require a surgical approach. But the common thread that runs through all of my decisions is simple: we will safeguard what we must to protect the American people, but we will also ensure the accountability and oversight that is the hallmark of our constitutional system. I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable. I will deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. I will tell the American people what I know and don't know, and when I release something publicly or keep something secret, I will tell you why.

In all of the areas that I have discussed today, the policies that I have proposed represent a new direction from the last eight years. To protect the American people and our values, we have banned enhanced interrogation techniques. We are closing the prison at Guantanamo. We are reforming Military Commissions, and we will pursue a new legal regime to detain terrorists. We are declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions, and narrowing our use of the State Secrets privilege. These are dramatic changes that will put our approach to national security on a surer, safer and more sustainable footing, and their implementation will take time.

Reading about Joe Biden's address to the Bosnian parliament yesterday, his remarks seems unusually blunt, bordering on disrespectful:

"Today, to be very blunt with you, I personally, and the leadership of my country is worried ... about the direction of your country and your future." ...

"The only real future is to join Europe," Biden said. "Right now you are off that path. You can follow this path to Europe or you can take an alternative path. You have done it before," Biden said, referring to the 1992-95 war.

"Failure to do so will ensure you remain among the poorest countries in Europe. At worst, you'll descend into ethnic chaos that defined your country for the better part of a decade."

There are lots of great reasons to visit Ghana, as Barack Obama announced last week that he will do this coming July. The country was recently host to succesful democratic elections; its tourist industry is certainly one of the best in West Africa (not only is the country home to the Cape Coast and other attractions, but the buses run on time); it has a great soccer team; and the country's economic growth has been impressive. As Ghana's Black Star News concluded: "Ghana is being rewarded for good governance, good economic management, and the rule of law."

But here's another interesting tidbit about Ghana: it just found oil -- estimated over 600 million barrels -- making it one of Africa's largest future producers. Production hasn't started yet, but when it does, the government will no doubt feel a boost in revenue, estimated as high as $1 billion annually. 

Wouldn't it be nice to buy oil from a country with a relatively clean record in human rights, governance, and economic management? That's a far cry fro the United States's third-largest current supplier, Nigeria, just next door. Of course, there are worries that Ghana could fall into the same rent-collecting state model, but it seems determined to resist that slip. And maybe that would be a good topic for Obama to pointedly discuss while visiting.

Who knows if this is really part of the reason for the visit, but it does seem like something that could figure into that "range of bilateral and regional issues" the White House plans to discuss with Ghanaian President John Atta-Mills.

Der Spiegel reports that the U.S. president is passing up an official visit to Berlin when he heads to Europe in June for the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landing, in favor of a more personal stopover:

On Tuesday, the news became public that a White House advance team is currently in the eastern German city of Dresden, where they are looking for possible accommodations for the president. In addition to a short visit to the city on the Elbe River, the president is also intending to visit the memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. Obama's great-uncle, Charlie Payne, served in the 89th Infantry Division during World War II and participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a forced labor camp that was a satellite camp of Buchenwald. ...

An official visit by Obama to Berlin seems highly unlikely during the German election campaign -- even though Chancellor Merkel for one would prefer the popular US president to make an official appearance at the Chancellery instead of touring around the states of Saxony and Thuringia.

Obama's already cut short a talk with Gordon Brown for a meeting with the Boy Scouts and bumped Lula for St. Patrick's Day. Now he's snubbing the chancellor of Germany for a couple days of tourism? (The German government also can't be thrilled that Obama's most memorable photo-op is likely to be at a concentration camp.)

So what's the deal? Does Obama just not like hanging out with other world leaders?

For a while last fall, I unsuccesfully tried to start an Internet meme by labelling other leader's attempts to associate themselves with Obama as "hopejacking." Since taking office, Obama seems to have been making a conscious effort to prevent this phenomenon by keeping eager leaders at arm's length. Consider this excerpt from Rajiv Chandrasekaran's piece today on the Obama administration's relationship with Hamid Karzai:

Ten days before Obama's inauguration, Karzai told Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a private meeting in Kabul that he looked forward to building with Obama the same sort of chummy relationship he had with Bush, which included frequent videoconferences and personal visits.

"Well, it's going to be different," Biden replied, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. "You'll probably talk to him or see him a couple of times a year. You're not going to be talking to him every week."

Obama advisers believe the relationship that Bush developed with Karzai masked the Afghan leader's flaws and made it difficult to demand accountability. Obama has not held a videoconference with Karzai, and the two have spoken by phone just twice. The administration rebuffed Karzai's request for a bilateral visit to Washington this spring, telling him he could come only as part of this week's tripartite summit with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, according to U.S. government officials. Karzai's meeting with Obama today is scheduled for 20 minutes, as is Zardari's. 

For a president who came into office promising to stop neglecting America's allies, Obama doesn't seem particularly excited to talk to them. Critics have charged that Obama has seemed more chummy with Hugo Chávez and Dmitry Medvedev than with staunch U.S. allies like Brown, Sarkozy, and Karzai, but I think the more pertinent point is that Obama seems to be basically friendly to all other world leaders without developing a close relationship with any of them.

Some of this may just be personality. Obama has been branded as aloof and cerebral since he was campaigning on the south side of Chicago and the reputation (seemingly with some justification) has dogged him ever since.

But there's likely also a deliberate effort, as Chandrasekaran suggests, to move away from George W. Bush's more personal style of diplomacy. (Peter Feaver has more on this over at Shadow Government.) This style led Bush to stand by some dubious leaders (Karzai, Pervez Musharraf, Vladimir Putin) with whom he had a close personal relationship while being inordinately preoccupied by belligerent leaders (Chávez, Saddam Hussein) who ultimately didn't prove that much of a threat.

I understand Obama's desire to change, and Bush-style personal diplomacy certainly doesn't seem suited to his temperment, but I worry when the U.S. president seems to want to treat other world leaders like students coming in for office hours. Nobody's suggesting they play a round of hoops, but 20 minutes each just doesn't seem like enough face time to give the leaders of two countries that are vital to U.S. security, no matter what he might think of them.

During his campaign, Obama argued to voters that speaking with other leaders doesn't imply support or agreement. 100+ days in, it's not clear when all that talking is going to start. David Brooks wrote a somewhat corny but basically perceptive column last summer arguing that there are really two Obamas, the cerebral "Dr. Barack" and "Fast Eddie Obama," the wheeling and dealing Chicago pol. I'm glad to have Dr. Barack designing U.S. strategy, but I sometimes wish we could send Fast Eddie to the meetings.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Hamas, in the eyes of the United States government, is a terrorist organization. It is illegal for the Palestinian Islamist party to receive American aid because it fails to meet three criteria established by U.S. law: it refuses to acknowledge Israel, renounce violence, or abide by previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In the event of the formation of a coalition government between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, this fact would prevent American aid from being delivered to the PA. To sidestep this problem, Secretary of State Clinton pressed Congress last week to amend a law, in order to keep money flowing to the PA should there be a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.

The Obama administration’s plan would allow the PA to receive American aid as long as the Hamas members of the coalition government met America’s three criteria, even if Hamas as an organization did not. Clinton noted that the United States continues to provide aid to the Lebanese government, despite the fact that Hezbollah is a member. She argued that cutting all of America’s financial strings to the PA would deprive it of the ability to affect a gradual change in Hamas’s behavior.

In addition to an ethical dilemma, this scheme also presents a bevy of political ones. Opinions of Democratic and Republican members of Congress have ranged from skeptical to hostile, with one Republican Congressmen describing it as similar to supporting a government “that only has a few Nazis in it.” An anonymous Israeli political source stated that the proposal was “painful and worrying.”

Obama deserves credit for bravery in putting forth a plan which will inevitably be portrayed as benefiting Hamas, an organization easily and deservedly vilified. However, the widening rift between the rival Palestinian factions makes the question of a unity government purely hypothetical, and suggests that Obama’s plan will have a greater impact in Washington and Jerusalem than it ever will in Ramallah.

For the past few days, FP's been calling and emailing some of our favorite foreign policy thinkers to get their grades on U.S. President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. We have all the responses here, but here's a cheat-sheet of the marks:

A

Walter Russell Mead

Lawrence Korb

Ricardo Avila

Parag Khanna

Laura Secor

 

A-

Charles Kupchan

Paul Pillar

Karim Sadjadpour

Jose Manuel Calvo

Marc Lynch

 

B+

Robert Kagan

Meghan O'Sullivan

Gianni Riotta

Cristina Manzano

Fawaz A. Gerges

Dmitri Trenin

Michael O'Hanlon

Ivan Krastev

David Rieff

Stephen Walt

 

B

Antonio Carlucci

John Mueller

 

B-

Philip Levy

Suzanne Maloney

William Inboden

Peter Feaver

 

C+

Dov Zakheim

Christian Brose

Michael Singh

Robert Reich

 

C

Ted Galen Carpenter

Danielle Pletka

 

C-

Kori Schake

 

D

Elliott Abrams

 

Pass

Dan Twining

Incomplete or None Given

Andrew Bacevich

David J. Kramer

David Rothkopf

Kenneth Roth

Philip Zelikow

We're getting more trickling in, and we'll be posting them on the blog, along with some of our favorite insightful foreign policy critiques.

What grade would you give Obama so far?

I asked Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch and a former Clinton administration official, to work through some of the foreign policy implications of the newly released torture memos with me.

We discussed whether the Bush administration memos encouraged other countries to torture, or led to any global uptick in "enhanced interrogation" practices. "I've always tried to be careful not to suggest that countries like Egypt or China or Uzbekistan would be torturing more because the United States was setting a bad example. Obviously, dictatorships torture for their own reasons, and they didn't need [former U.S. President] George W. Bush to show them how," he says.

But, the Bush administration torture of detainees and disavowal of the Geneva Conventions did preclude diplomacy on many occasions, Malinowski says. He testified before the Helsinki Commission in 2007 to make the point:

A couple of years ago, Human Rights Watch was meeting with the Prime Minister of Egypt, and we raised a case in which hundreds of prisoners rounded up after a terrorist bombing were tortured by Egyptian security forces.   The Prime Minister didn't deny the charge.  He answered, "We're just doing what the United States does."  We've had Guantanamo and the administration's interrogation policies thrown back in our face in meetings with officials from many other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and Lebanon.  U.S. diplomats have told us they face the same problem.  A U.S. ambassador to a leading Middle Eastern country, for example, has told us that he can no longer raise the issue of torture in that country as a result. 

Malinowski says the detainee abuse made it difficult for the White House to negotiate any human rights provisions or issues, broadly. "Issues beyond torture were effected, because it enabled authoritarian governments to say, ‘You have no right to lecture us,'" he says. "They were delighted to tweak the United States on it."

The biggest offender? Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who Malinowski described as a "world champion" of chiding the United States via its own policies.

Nevertheless, Malinowski thinks that, despite the horrible details revealed by the Bush administration and International Committee of the Red Cross memos, ultimately their release is a very good thing for the Obama administration.

[Obama] can go to a country like Turkey or Indonesia or Egypt and say, "Look, I know what it's like to face real security threats, and we as Americans understand the temptation to give up some of our liberties and principles to defend ourselves against those threats. But what we've learned the hard way in the last eight years is that those liberties and principles actually make us stronger. You could learn from our example."

That's a much more effective way of arguing the point than going to those same countries and saying, look at our perfect system and our glorious morality, and maybe someday you can be as good as we are. So I think if he uses the experience as a cautionary tale, it will actually make our country a more effective and compelling champion of human rights around the world, ironically.

Here's to hoping so.

Photo: Entrance to Bagram Air Base by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Writing in the Washington Times, Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake report that the Department of Homeland Security has produced and disseminated a nine-page report on the threat of "rightwing extremist activity," spurred by the global economic crisis, election of a black president, and the return of "disgruntled war veterans."

The nine-page document was sent to police and sheriff's departments across the United States on April 7 under the headline, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment."

It says the federal government "will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months" to gather information on "rightwing extremist activity in the United States"....

"Most statements by rightwing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action," the report says. "In two instances in the run-up to the election, extremists appeared to be in the early planning stages of some threatening activity targeting the Democratic nominee, but law enforcement interceded." 

In producing the report, the United States joins numerous European countries facing possible right-wing nationalist activity. But Europe's long-struggled with nationalism stoked by immigration from ethnic minorities; it has right-wing anti-immigration political parties, mainstreaming sentiment which might otherwise be considered or become extremist.

In Great Britain, the Labour Party has worried that the British National Party, which condemns "non-white immigration," may win a Parliamenary seat. So have parties in Austria and Turkey.

Preeti Aroon

"Scholars on the Sidelines," by Joseph S. Nye Jr. in the Washington Post. Referencing FP's "Inside the Ivory Tower," Nye argues that American academics are "paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world" and that more scholarship should have "real-world relevance."

Elizabeth Dickinson

David Gardner asks a provocative question in this weekend's Financial Times: Is the West's fear of political Islam condemning the Middle East to a generation of poor leadership? Political Islam is the new communism, he argues; the United States fears it so much that it prefers despots to even the most moderate Islamists. The Middle East, by implication, might be going through the same bout of poor leadership that afflicted Latin America and Africa as the Cold War contest played out in their regions.

Rebecca Frankel

"War By Any Other Name." Joe Queenan takes a look at the ripples of the Obama administration's "semi-official" move to revamp the vocabulary for "the war on terror" and the attempt to distance itself from the Bush administration's "fierce" rhetoric. Money quote: "From now on, the bad guys will be referred to as 'the ostensibly malefic.' We'll get back to you when we have a new term for 'the good guys.'"

(Bonus pick: Presidential Pets. Couldn't resist...)

Britt Peterson

Walter Benn Michaels's essay "Going Boom," in the February/March issue of Bookforum. According to Michaels, boom time for markets is bust time for literature, which turns back to unhappy but irrelevant periods of the past when there's not enough drama in the present day (the 1990s-2000s spike in popular fiction about the Holocaust), or focuses boringly inward (the memoir, anything Oprah's Book Club recommends). But, during an economic collapse, Western novelists will have enough material to deal relevantly with the present, and financial crisis fiction will blossom. (Hat tip: Paper Cuts)

Annie Lowrey

U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag blogs that crime has fallen in New York City during the recession. Indeed, Orszag says economic bad-times tend to spur property crimes, but not violent crimes. "One reason may be that alcohol use tends to decline during recessions (another potentially surprising finding), and that the reduction in alcohol use reduces violent crime," he notes. (Hat tip: Tapped)

Andrew Polk

Nouriel Roubini puts a brake on all the sanguine predictions for China’s 2009 recovery prospects in a report titled "Outlook for China's Economy in 2009 and Beyond." In the analysis, Dr. Doom tells investors not to get ahead of themselves, as the Chinese economy has not seen a true rebalancing toward domestic consumption, but he also notes one major positive: The country's trade surplus might finally be shrinking.

Greg Shtraks

Today's big story on the high seas are the Somalian buccaneers, but the future of naval warfare may be developing in another part of the Indian Ocean. While India is taking measures to protect its vulnerable coast from terrorist attacks, China is preparing to make a major announcement at the 60th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on April 23rd. Writing in Time Magazine, Howard Chua-Eoan describes the brewing naval rivalry developing between Asia's two aspiring superpowers. 

Indispensible financial blogger Felix Salmon, Liam Halligan for The Telegraph, and the New York Times have been parsing the fine print of the G-20 Communique, which promised $1 trillion in additional funding to help ease the financial crisis and get countries growing again. 

They note that countries, including the United States, are behind on their IMF funding -- the crux of the program -- and require various sorts of congressional approval; therefore, the funding push may be illusory. The NYT concludes: "Some of the money has yet to be pledged, some is double-counted and some would be counted in a 'synthetic currency' that is not actually real money."

In some sense, none of this should come as a surprise; the "$1 trillion" number hardly represented the sum of an ordered and pledged budget. The Communique included massive sums with little fine print. Member-states' contributions to international organizations always become backed-up. And the ink isn't dry on the page yet -- there's been little time to sort out which commitments will come to fruition first. 

The New York Times notices a specific potential problem:

In perhaps the most novel move, the Group of 20 authorized the monetary fund to issue $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights, known as S.D.R.’s — a “virtual currency” whose value is set by a basket of real currencies like the dollar, euro and British pound. The I.M.F. will issue the S.D.R.’s to all 185 of its members, and they in turn can lend them out to poor countries.

Special Drawing Rights are not cash but a form of credit, against which a country can borrow. The Obama administration, which conceived the idea and sold it to the Group of 20, figures it would create between $15 billion and $20 billion in additional credit for the poorest countries.

But there is a caveat here as well. For the program’s benefits to be felt globally, the United States and Europe will need to lend out their Special Drawing Rights. In the United States, that will require Congressional approval.

To say that the SDRs aren't a real currency is both true and false. They are a unit of exchange eventually backed with actual cash; the IMF collects money from the member-states to fund them.

And countries like Russia and China, as well as IMF representatives themselves, have called for massive revisions to the outmoded program, to make it useful for alleviating the recession. How that will work remains to be seen.

Plus, it seems early days to be sounding the death knell for the G-20 spending promises. Will the $1 trillion number prove correct? No. But that isn't to say the IMF won't massively expand to aid ailing countries -- ultimately the point of the summit. 

This morning, Politico reports on a Rasmussen poll taken two days before North Korea's botched rocket launch. The release leads with the alarming line: "Fifty-seven percent (57%) of U.S. voters nationwide favor a military response to eliminate North Korea’s missile launching capability."

The poll shows that both genders support military intervention equally, and that two-thirds of Republicans and just over half of Democrats do. Only 15 percent oppose it. 

Still, it's not convincing evidence that most Americans are clamoring to send in the troops. The question read: 

If North Korea launches a long-range missile, should the United States take military action to eliminate North Korea's ability to launch missiles?

Thus far, North Korea hasn't shown a lot of success with long-range missiles. The question also came immediately after one about concern over North Korea's nuclear capacity. 

The most interesting finding of the poll, perhaps, shows a 14-point drop in people considering North Korea an enemy, and a massive skew along political lines over whether the Stalinist collectivist state is an enemy, ally, or something in between:

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Republicans consider North Korea an enemy of the United States. That view is shared by 50% of unaffiliateds and 28% of Democrats. Most Democrats (57%) place North Korea somewhere between ally and enemy.

Photo: Flickr user Borut Peterlin 

The New York Times reports, following the Mexican media, that Hillary Clinton's visit to Mexico is in danger of being upstaged by concerns over Obama's reported pick for ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual. Pascual, who is director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and former ambassador to Ukraine, has written extensively about failed states and ran the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization under the Bush administration:

That could raise hackles among some Mexicans, who take umbrage at recent assertions by American analysts that drug-related violence has so destabilized Mexico that it is danger of becoming a failed state.

Pascual's views on state failure are state laid out in this 2005 Foreign Affairs piece (subscribers only) co-written with Stephen Krasner:

In today's increasingly interconnected world, weak and failed states pose an acute risk to U.S. and global security. Indeed, they present one of the most important foreign policy challenges of the contemporary era. States are most vulnerable to collapse in the time immediately before, during, and after conflict. When chaos prevails, terrorism, narcotics trade, weapons proliferation, and other forms of organized crime can flourish. Left in dire straits, subject to depredation, and denied access to basic services, people become susceptible to the exhortations of demagogues and hatemongers.

Most of Pascual's work concerns post-conflict scenarios like Iraq and Afghanistan and doesn't quite apply to Mexico's current situation. I haven't been able to find anything he's written specifically on Mexico and he didn't mention drugs or Mexico as major concerns in his Brookings "memo to the President.

It'll be interesting to see if he shares the view, put forth by Niall Ferguson and Sam Quinones in the most recent issue of FP, that the Mexican state is in danger of being overwhelmed by a "criminal-capitalist insurgency." His appointment does seem to indicate that the Obama adminsitration is taking that possibility seriously.

Photo: Brookings Institution