Word: mandelbaum
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...thought the Clinton Administration frittered away American power in places that weren't worth it, ignoring matters of vital U.S. national interest in favor of a feel-good, bleeding-heart preoccupation with the suffering of those unfortunate to live in places of no consequence. In a biting criticism, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University in a 1996 article in Foreign Affairs dubbed the Clintonian strategy "foreign policy as social work." Such an approach, Mandelbaum argued, was bound to be both prohibitively expensive and unlikely to sustain the support of the American public...
...called Mandelbaum last week and asked him whether he thought social work was now in style. "Indeed," he said, and so it is. In Iraq today, U.S. soldiers are building soccer fields and standing guard over girls' schools. This is being done in the name of an Administration whose members openly despised Clinton's habit of using the armed forces for missions short of war. ("We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten," said Condoleezza Rice, now National Security Adviser, to the New York Times in 2000.) As for Liberia, all the key phrases last...
...they argue, his rule was so vile that getting rid of it was a service to mankind. That is true. But if the test for deploying American power to remove a regime is not the danger it poses to the U.S. but its wickedness, why stop at Iraq? As Mandelbaum wrote seven years ago, "The world is a big place filled with distressed people." Why not ease the suffering of those in, say, Burma or Zimbabwe...
...that's an unfair question, for nobody expects a nation's foreign policy to be neatly consistent. But the fact that it can be asked at all illustrates the dangers that await any Administration that strays from the national interest as the lodestar of its policy. The point, as Mandelbaum says, is "not that social work is a bad thing." On the contrary, it can be positively noble in intent and execution. Are we really to say that it was a mistake for the U.S. to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo (where there was about as much of a direct...
...there were just two cases of the disease in Shanghai (pop. 17 million). Chernobyl eventually helped promote positive change in the Soviet Union as citizens grasped just how awful the system had become. Gorbachev realized that "even if you wanted to be Stalin, you couldn't anymore," says Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Within months, the Soviet leader accelerated his perestroika and glasnost reforms, which speeded the collapse of Soviet communism. In China, Hu sacked the health minister and Beijing's mayor. But it still isn't clear whether he and other top officials...