Pivot but Hedge: A Strategy for Pivoting to Asia While Hedging in the Middle East

The U.S. government's new emphasis on the Asia-Pacific represents a bold strategic choice that could animate U.S. national security policy for years to come. Yet the United States must balance its rightful new focus on the Asia-Pacific with the volatility that still exists in other areas of the world. The United States should pivot to the Asia-Pacific—but to protect its vital interests, it should also hedge against threats elsewhere, particularly in the greater Middle East. To implement a “Pivot but Hedge” strategy, the U.S. government should do three things. First, it should exercise caution when cutting the defense budget. Second, it should give the military services greater leadership roles in specific regions: naval and air forces should lead in the Asia-Pacific, while ground forces should lead in the greater Middle East. Third, it should maintain expansible, capable, and well-trained ground forces as a hedge against global uncertainty.     

The Enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919–1923

This paper uses the episode of the Kapp putsch in March 1920 to isolate and analyze a number of high policy themes that dominated the period from the signature of the Treaty of Versailles through to the Franco-Belgian invasion of the Ruhr. These included: the questions of what mechanisms existed to enforce the treaty; the sanctions available to the victorious governments to enforce their will; the position and problems of the German government; the relationship and suspicions existing between Britain and France and the differing aims, ambitions, and approaches of the major participants.     

Disability and support relationships: What role does policy play?

Very little is known about how relationships between people with disabilities and their paid support workers are positioned in policy. With the policy shift toward choice of provider, individualised approaches, person centredness and self‐directed funding, the nature of their relationship assumes a more prominent role in the quality of support practice. The policy analysis in this article explores the extent to which current disability policy acknowledges, promotes, or diminishes the relationships between people with disabilities and workers, in their organisational context. It uses Honneth's conditions for recognition—love (cared for), rights (respected) and solidarity or social esteem (valued)—to understand how policy positions mutuality in the relationship. The policy review applied a three‐stage process: categorisation of policies, textual analysis and content analysis to policy documents at four levels—international, Australian federal, state and organisational in two case studies. The analysis revealed that while a rights framework is explicit in most policies, the emphases on the conditions for recognition within a relationship between people with disabilities and workers are compromised in instructional policies that attempt to manage the tension between choice and risk, particularly at the organisational level.     

The potential of urinary androstdiene markers to identify 4-androstenediol (4-ADIOL) administration in athletes

Doping control laboratories accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) require criteria that allow endogenous steroids to be distinguished from their synthetic analogues in urine. Methodology based on "looking outside the metabolic box" was used in this study to identify diagnostic urinary markers of 4-androstenediol (4-ADIOL) administration. Androst-2,4-diene-17-one and androst-3,5-diene-17-one are proposed to be formed in urine from acid-catalyzed hydrolysis of 4-ADIOL sulfoconjugate, a major phase II metabolic product of 4-ADIOL. The presence of these markers in the routine gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) steroid screen was suitable to identify samples requiring confirmation by gas chromatography-combustion-isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC-C-IRMS) - to measure the carbon isotope ratio (δ(13)C) of the androstdiene markers and confirm their likely synthetic origin based on depleted (13)C content.