近期美国升高西太平洋紧张局势的战略意图及其影响

随着美国全球战略重心加速东移,特别是在近期美国从伊拉克撤军与从阿富汗准备抽身而退之时,美国在亚太地区频频举行军事演习,尤其是美借天安舰之机,趁势强化美韩与美日同盟,并高调介入南海争端,与东南亚伙伴强化军事互动,积极谋求南海争端的国际化。美国正沿太平洋,从东北亚至东南亚一线,事实上形成了针对中国的战略围堵。美国近期升高西太平洋紧张局势的一系列举动并不是偶然的,而是冷战后美国全球战略重心从大西洋向太平洋转移的重要组成部分。奥巴马加速重返亚太的战略调整将对中国实施远海战略与拓展战略纵深以及推行和谐周边的外交战略产生冲击。     

奥巴马政府亚太战略解析

21世纪初亚洲地位的迅速提升正在引起美国全球战略重心的东移。奥巴马政府亚太战略的目标,是要在"美国的太平洋世纪"里,"保持和加强美国在亚太地区的领导能力,改善安全,扩大繁荣,促进美国的价值观"。为此,美国将以"前沿部署外交"为开端,按照"六条关键性的行动路线"向前推进:增强美国的双边安全同盟;深化美国与新兴大国的关系;发展与区域性多边机构的接触;扩大贸易和投资;打造基础广泛的军事存在;增进民主和人权。这表明,"现实的理想主义"构成了奥巴马政府亚太战略的战略理念。     

Democracy Promotion versus Engagement with Iran

US President Barack Obama has tried two very distinct policy options in dealing with Iran. The engagement policy was designed to make a break with the past experience and re-start US-Iran relations on a positive footing. This approach was consistent with the advice offered to the new administration by Iran analysts and leaders of non-governmental organisations. The implication of the engagement policy, however, was sidelining the US commitment to democracy and human rights in Iran. This policy could offer little to the budding reform movement in 2009. The alternative policy of containment was not beneficial to the reform movement either. The policy shift at the end of 2009 was a response to Iran's failure to comply with the requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The containment policy, manifested in the fourth round of UN-imposed sanctions on Iran, has led to a further entrenching of the hard-liners in the regime and intolerance of internal dissent.     

Transatlantic Relations Four Years Later: The Elusive Quest for a Strategic Vision

The transatlantic tensions of the Bush years are behind us but the future of transatlantic relations remains uncertain at the closing of the Obama term. Policy alignment has been found on a host of issues but ‘existential’ questions have resurfaced, casting shadows on Western unity and relevance in the coming years. So far the crisis has failed to focus attention on the need for a common vision for the 21st century. Key strategic issues, from the future of the European order to transatlantic engagement in the Middle East, should figure prominently on the next transatlantic agenda, shifting the debate from the notion of a ‘Pacific century’ to how the West can address ongoing power transitions.     

试论奥巴马第二任期以来亚太安全政策的调整

美国总统奥巴马开始第二任期后,继续推动"亚太再平衡"战略,并对亚太安全政策进行了调整。主要表现为继续强化在亚太地区的军事能力和安全存在、注重发挥盟友和安全伙伴的作用、通过多元化资源投入弥补安全的有限性以及对地区热点问题采取有效管控等。但美国亚太安全政策也受国内的孤立主义思潮、国防预算的削减、其他地区热点问题的掣肘以及亚太地区其他国家的动能不足等因素的制约。中国应把握奥巴马政府安全政策调整的机会,降低来自美国的安全压力。     

论奥巴马政府对俄政策调整的原因及俄美关系前景

前些年,布什政府对俄罗斯奉行的"挤压、遏制及削弱"的"单边主义"政策,致使美俄关系陷入日益"冰化"的状态。奥巴马上台后,呈现出谋求修复和改善与俄罗斯关系的政策调整趋势,而美国"单边主义"政策的挫败、俄罗斯方面的积极"抗争"以及美俄势力此消彼长的发展趋势等则是美国对俄政策调整的主要原因;以美国对俄政策调整为契机,美俄关系有望进入一个"合作加强、对抗减少"的"建设性"新阶段,然而,由于一系列制约性因素的存在,俄美关系的实质性改善仍任重而道远。     

Letter from North Haven … Or What the President Should Do Next

Letter from North Haven is an essay on American national identity that shows the depth of small town mentalities in American life—no matter that that life is mainly urban and industrial. We move from Chicago School sociology to the Catcher in the Rye; from Bob Dylan to Steven Spielberg; from Jacksonian Democracy to the Tea Party movement. The essay ends by using the example of politics in North Haven, Maine, to call upon the President to revive his campaign by explaining America's problems in the plain style and tangible context of small town USA.     

Teaching Obama: history,critical race theory and social work education

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.     

Prologue: the riddle of race

ABSTRACT

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard's essay on the case of race in the United States.     

“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence – a noun,a verb and 9/11”: terrorism,fear and the after,after 9/11

In the years since 11 September 2001, pundits, politicians and scholars of terrorism and international relations routinely have declared that 9/11 “changed everything”. This article explores not only how those decisions transformed the United States and the global response to terrorism, but also how both the decisions and response sustained a sense of fear. Further, they made possible, to paraphrase then candidate Joseph Biden’s critique of former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, the framing of so much of the global political debate about terrorism, and national security references as simply 9/11 accompanied by a noun and a verb. Finally, the article examines the consequences of this framing for not only our understanding of terrorism, but also our understanding of terrorism and violence within the current global system.