An alternative way forward for the US

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI29Aa01.html

WASHINGTON - After two years of consultations with more than 400 members of the US foreign-policy elite, a project headed by two leading international-relations academics is calling for the adoption of a new grand strategy designed to address multiple threats and strengthen Washington's commitment to a reformed and reinvigorated multilateral order.

In a wide-ranging report released in Washington on Wednesday, the Princeton Project on National Security suggested that the policies pursued by President George W Bush since September 11, 2001, had been simplistic - even counter-productive - for the challenges facing the United States in the 21st century.

To be effective, according to the report, US policy needed to rely less on military power and more on other tools of diplomacy; less on its own strength exercised unilaterally and more on cooperation with other democratic states; and less on rapid democratization based on popular elections and more on building what it called "popular, accountable, rights-regarding {PAR} governments".

The report also calls for performing "radical surgery" on the international institutions created in the aftermath of World War II, including significantly increasing membership in the United Nations Security Council and developing a "Concert of Democracies" that would provide an alternative forum for collective action, including the use of force.

On more specific issues, it calls for Washington to "take the lead in doing everything possible" to achieve a comprehensive two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict; to offer Iran security assurances in exchange for its agreement not to develop a nuclear-weapons capacity; and to neither "block or contain" China, but rather to "help it achieve its legitimate ambitions within the current international order".

The project and its 90-page report, "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: US National Security in the 21st Century", was co-directed by the head of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and John Ikenberry, a prominent international-relations scholar at the school.

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1. Yet another way:

[Iris]

2. interesting.

I'm actually just responding b/c I'm dead tired but I wanted to remind myself to come back here tomorrow and read more carefully (and look at responses)!

ps - I know about bookmarks, but I always bookmark and never go back.