Twenty Second August Two Thousand Nine

Item 1: "Time to Boycott Israel" by Neve Gordon

- The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state
- Israel - 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside
- Two moral ways of abolishing an arpatheid state:
i. One-state solution - offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a binational democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel - demise of Israel as a Jewish state
ii. Two-state solution - which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders, division of Jerusalem and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return
- the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure


Item 2: "Still Going Nowhere Man" by Jacob Heilburn

- Deputy U.N. Ambassador Mona Juul called Ban -- the South Korean foreign minister elected secretary-general in 2007 -- "spineless," "charmless," and, most importantly, "incapable" of setting an agenda
- visited Sri Lanka - failed to secure any relief for the Tamil refugees who the government had herded into camps by waging an indiscriminate bombing campaign
- in Burma - offered the ruling military junta political cover by meeting with it - failing to win any concessions on human rights generally or in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi in particular


Item 3: "OPEC's Greed will Herald the End of the Oil Age" by Bill Emmott

- The world is not running out of oil - What it is short of has been investment in oilfields and production - the reason for that can be found in a different four-letter word: Opec
- oil producers’ cartel has deliberately cut production by nearly five million barrels a day - more than the drop in global demand, to keep prices high
- Opec members account for only about 35 per cent of world supply, but Russia, a non-member, accounts for a further 11.5 per cent and is co-operating with their efforts
- US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, swallowed her human rights scruples and paid homage to the Angolans on her tour of Africa, lest they become overly friendly with China instead


Item 4: "The Default Power" by Josef Joffe

- China is a place where the rest of the world essentially rents workers and workspace at deflated prices
- Chinese economy is extremely dependent on exports — they amount to around two-fifths of G.D.P.
- What puts America in a league of its own?:
i. world’s most sophisticated military panoply
ii. U.S. economy to be worth $14.3 trillion, three times as much as the second-biggest economy, Japan’s
iii. per capita income - $47,000 per inhabitant
iv. unmatched research and higher-education establishment
- United States is the default power because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose - does what others cannot or will not do


Item 5: "NATO and World Security" by Zbigniew Brzezinski

- NATO has institutionalized three monumental transformations in world affairs:
i. end of the centuries-long “civil war” within the West for trans-oceanic and European supremacy
ii. United States’s post–World War II commitment to the defense of Europe against Soviet domination
iii. eaceful termination of the Cold War, which created the preconditions for a larger democratic European Union
- alliance also needs to define for itself a geopolitically relevant long-term strategic goal for its relationship with the Russian Federation
- global NATO would dilute the centrality of the U.S.-European connection, and none of the rising powers would be likely to accept membership in a globally expanded NATO
- ideologically defined global alliance of democracies would face serious difficulties in determining whom to exclude and in striking a reasonable balance between its doctrinal and strategic purposes