Epstein Secrets

Kori Schake April 11, 2014 -- Secretary of State John Kerry's push for Middle East peace has come to this sorry impasse: The Israelis demanding the United States release a traitor before they are willing to proceed with previously agreed releases of Palestinians, and the Palestinians playing for internationa

urled in Washington. According to John McCain: "I travel all around the world and I hear unanimously that the United States is withdrawing and that the United States' influence is on the wane and that bad things are going to happen, and they are happening." The charge of retreat is a potent one. It's also a compl

f the same; NATO is in disarray; Iran's and North Korea's nuclear-weapons programs proceed unhindered; Beijing's territorial claims in the East and South China Seas go unanswered; and the global threat of terrorism continues to metastasize. And that's just a partial list. It is simply not possible for mere huma

TA00684047 It's been clear for years that the one thing that might—and only might— change the Israeli government's thinking is a credible threat by the United States of pulling away, cutting back its military aid, and joining an international effort to isolate the Jewish state. If the United States were to remov

ntinues to disintegrate, Ukraine is shaken from Donetsk to Crimea, and serious tensions are rising between China and its neighbours in the East and South China Seas. More globally, the most recent report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that, if we do not shift massively away from fo

tment, but at some point the same forces of change that were transforming the rest of the world were bound to visit there as well. There was no way the United States would ever have pushed meaningful reform, let alone broken our ties with the authoritarians, unless the street did it for us. Great powers don't pi

America and demonstrate its willingness to abide by global norms. A good start would be to submit territorial disputes over islands in the East and South China Seas to international arbitration. Another step would be to strengthen promising regional bodies such as the East Asian Summit and ASEAN Plus Three. Abo

ral Kofi Annan announced as one of the ambitious Millennium Development Goals halving extreme global poverty by 2015. That goal was far exceeded, and the U.S. National Intelligence Council has predicted that extreme poverty will be reduced even further by 2030-which would constitute one of the most remarkab

ide in some of its dealings with Japan and some members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations over territorial disputes in the East China and South China Seas. The possibility of an aggressive, militaristic China cannot be ruled out. But we have come a vast distance since the days when Mao openly talked ab