The Great Debate

– Willis Sparks is a Global Macro analyst at the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group. The views expressed are his own. –

Few things in life amused my dad more than a good karate movie. I once asked what he found so funny about Bruce Lee’s jaw-dropping display of poise and power. “Nice of the bad guys to attack him one at a time,” he said. In the real world, threats don’t arrive single-file, like jets lining up for takeoff.

President Barack Obama’s toughest foreign-policy challenge will be in managing the sheer number of complex problems he’s inherited and their refusal to arrive in orderly fashion. In addition, the still-metastasizing global financial crisis will exacerbate several of these problems, by depriving a number of governments of the funding they need to maintain social stability and to meet internal and external threats to their security.

AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

There is clearly a risk of collision at the intersection of Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of them plagued with floundering elected governments and deteriorating security environments. In Afghanistan, once Obama keeps his promise to provide thousands more U.S. troops, he must decide whether his team can afford to work around President Hamid Karzai (who may win reelection in August) and more directly engage tribal leaders and willing members of the Taliban to restore stability.

But Afghanistan’s security continues to depend on the ability of U.S. forces to stem the flow of militants and supplies into the country from tribal areas in Pakistan. Aware that Pakistan’s armed forces are neither reliably willing nor able to help, the Obama team must find a way to neutralize Pakistani militants without arousing broad public anger across the country and destabilizing its cash-strapped government.

- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

By Eric Auchard

LONDON (Reuters) – With world economies fast running out of steam, it may seem an unlikely time for cash-strapped governments to discover universal broadband access as an urgent national funding priority.

Yet in this financial plague year, the Great Broadband Bailout of 2009 is rocketing up the political agenda as the global economic crisis deepens further.

President Barack Obama inherits a distinctly gloomy outlook for progress in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Is change really possible?

Reuters asked Oliver McTernan, the director a UK charity called Forward Thinking and two experts from the Brookings Institution in Washington — former Ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth Pollack — what steps the Obama administration should take next in the Middle East.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –

Can any U.S. administration avoid the fate spelled out in the following 12 words? “We were elected to change Washington and we let Washington change us.”

Thus spoke John McCain when he formally accepted the Republican party’s nomination for president last September. He then listed a number of reasons why the party had lost the trust of the American people, including that “some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption”.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The argument about bank bonus payments is as sterile as it is backward looking; compensation at government insured institutions is going nowhere but down.

The real action will be at those places like hedge funds, private equity houses and boutiques, which will try and trade less insurance for more autonomy and which will capture more market share, take on more risk and offer more reward. The question is how will they be regulated, how will they fund themselves and how will the rest of us be protected from the systemic risk they could easily represent.

– Peter Schechter is an author and an international political and communications consultant. A founder of one of Washington’s strategic communications consulting firms, he has spent twenty years advising Presidents, writing advertising for political parties, ghost-writing columns for CEO’s, and counseling international organizations out of crises. “Pipeline” is his second novel. The views expressed are his own. –

After an eighteen year sabbatical, we fiction writers have recently put Russia back foursquare into its role as a novelist’s favorite fierce antagonist.  For decades, thrillers were dominated by the threatening Soviet imagery spun by John Le Carré, Tom Clancy and Frederick Forsythe.  Now, recent offerings like Daniel Silva’s “Moscow Rules”, Ted Bell’s “Tsar”, and my own “Pipeline” again reassign Russia its place of concern for political leaders, intelligence agencies and military planners.

That Russia provides good material is no surprise. The non-fiction Russia uses natural resources for coercion.  It militarily overwhelms a small neighbor. It crushes domestic dissension through physical or psychological intimidation. It suffers from near-obsessive mistrust of foreigners’ intentions.  Oligarchs and Kremlin bureaucrats are locked in a maze of corruption, mafia and violence.

– Arturo Sarukhan, a career diplomat, has been Mexican ambassador to the United States since 2007. Ambassador Sarukhan was President Calderon’s chief foreign policy adviser and international spokesperson during the 2006 presidential campaign and headed his foreign policy transition team. The views expressed are his own. —

On January 12th, President Felipe Calderón and then President Elect Barack Obama held their first working meeting in Washington, DC, reflecting their commitment to strengthen the bilateral relationship. The conversation between the two leaders made it abundantly clearly that designing a framework that will simultaneously ensure the common prosperity and the common security of both our peoples remains the central conundrum our two nations face in a post 9-11 world.

Mexico is fully aware that a threat to the security of the United States will profoundly affect the bilateral relationship, and therefore common border security has been and will continue to be a top-priority. In this regard, a clear and present threat we both face is transnational organized crime.

President Barack Obama set a $500,000 annual pay cap on Wednesday for executives at companies getting taxpayer bailouts as part of a wider process to clamp down on excessive corporate pay.

The new rules would require banks and other companies that get government funds in the future to abide by the new cap going forward, with any additional compensation being limited to restricted stock that does not vest until government funds are paid back.

The following are comments from the market on the new plan. Add your own view in the comments section.

–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–

Twenty years ago this month, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan after a disastrous war that lasted nine years, seven weeks and three days. Barring military and political miracles, the United States will stay longer in Afghanistan than the Soviets did. Considerably longer.

Present U.S. plans to reinforce troops fighting a war that is, by most accounts, going badly, provide for up to 30,000 additional soldiers to be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. By that time, the U.S. presence will almost have matched the Soviets’ stay and will exceed it by the end of 2010.

– George A. Cloutier, a graduate of Harvard Business School, is the founder and CEO of American Management Services, one of the nation’s largest turnaround and management services firms specializing in small and mid-size companies. He is also the author of the upcoming book, “Profits aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing.” The views expressed are his own. –

Why are the Obama Administration, Congress, and the Senate marginalizing the nation’s largest industry in the new stimulus plan?

Small Business Inc. employs about 60 million people, accounts for 70 percent of new jobs each year, and clearly represents the backbone of almost every regional and local economy. For this vital industry, the administration has allocated less than 1 percent ($700 million earmarked vs. $1 trillion in proposals). The nation’s leaders continue the small business program of the Bush years: talk a lot and do practically nothing.