Foreign Policy in Focus

U.S. foreign policy and national security policies have significant domestic and international environmental impacts, and the increasingly precarious state of the global environment presents important new challenges to U.S. national interests.

The U.S. government has made the rigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) a top priority of its foreign policy, using international trade negotiations as the means of continually ratcheting up the terms.

On Africa’s Atlantic coast, at the western extremity of the Arab world, lies Western Sahara, site of Africa’s longest post-colonial conflict.

One of the major challenges faced by the international community is how to address environmental problems that, although created locally, have global consequences.

Consistent with U.S. political interests to promote a private sector agenda, the World Bank has accentuated the private sector in its operations and highlighted financial support for the private sector in its own agenda in the last few years.

After a decade of rapid growth, the international financial system is now plagued with extreme volatility and crisis.

The Clinton administration continues to promote the deeply flawed “Washington consensus” of neoliberal globalization in the APEC countries.

The massive terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have placed the threat of terrorism on the front burner and have exposed the failure of the U.S. government to protect its citizens.

Indonesia’s recent economic and political collapse is a stark example of the outright failure of a development paradigm promoting large-scale economic growth without political, social, legal, and environmental safeguards.

The agenda of the WTO, the implementation of its agreements, and the much-praised dispute settlement system all serve to advance the interests of developed countries, sidelining those of the developing countries.

The IMF was created as the “guardian” of the global economy, promoting unimpeded trade and ensuring that national exchange rates would stay within set values.

The failure of sustainable economic growth to take hold in the developing world demonstrates that “free trade” is not delivering on its promise to bring prosperity to the world’s poor.

Increased economic globalization has resulted in an increased feminization of poverty, forcing greater numbers of women worldwide to migrate in search of work.

Although the world market for environmental technologies is twice the size of the world arms market, the U.S. supports its arms exports over its environmental technologies market by a staggeringly large margin.

The certification process is resented in Latin America and elsewhere as a unilateral, sometimes arbitrary and hypocritical exercise by the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs.

When the Soviet Union abruptly ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, it seemed that the West, particularly the U.S., finally had what it had always wanted–the opportunity to introduce quick, all-encompassing economic reform that would remake Russia in the West’s own image.

U.S.-Russian security relations have slowly deteriorated since 1993.

The environmental implications of this decade’s massive movements of money into the developing world, while enormous, are also complex and somewhat contradictory.

Shaping new international rules for labor rights, environmental protection, gender equity, minority rights, sustainable development, and other social goals is a formidable political challenge in view of the forces promoting profit-above-all trade and investment policies.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has long been associated with the overthrow of governments and the installation of bloody military regimes.