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BEST
& WORST OF 2007 by JEFFREY LAURENTI: 10/01/08
(MaximsNews Network)
UNITED
NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / - 10
January 2007 -- MaximsNews Contributor
Jeffrey Laurenti of The
Century Foundation picks the world's top news stories of 2007 for their
greatest long-term significance - The Best and The Worst - and this can also be
compared with his picks for the Year 2006:
The Best of 2007
Annapolis restarts Mideast peace negotiations. Fears about Iran pricked the Bush
administration into making a good-faith effort in Annapolis to convene Arab and
Israeli leaders - including a delegation from Syria - to restart peace
negotiations that had been suspended since early 2001. Many doubted the
administration could achieve the promised completion of a comprehensive peace
settlement before the end of Bush's term, but at least Washington's
conservatives were now committed to peace negotiations.
Bali marks U.S. re-engagement to control global warming. Beleaguered by a newly
Democratic-led Congress pushing tough mileage mandates and conservation in a
major energy bill in Washington, pressures from the states, and the ouster of
its last ostrich ally in Australia, the Bush administration relented on the last
day of Bali talks to accept the framework for global negotiations on a global
pact imposing binding cuts in emissions to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.
Democracy resurgent. Citizens exercised power at ballot boxes to reclaim control
over their governments in Thailand and Venezuela, where voters respectively
overturned a military coup and contained an overreaching caudillo. Elsewhere,
voters broke the mold in presidential elections in Argentina and France,
installed a pro-business conservative government in South Korea, dumped the
disruptively nationalist Kaczynski twins in Poland, and cheered an insurgency
toppling the entrenched leadership in South Africa's dominant party.
Economic growth spurt in Africa. Long the world's economic basket case, Africa's
economic growth rate continues to accelerate, reaching 5.7 percent in 2006
(compared to 5.3 percent in 2005 and 5.2 percent in 2004) - ahead of Latin
America's 4.8 percent - but still less than the 7 percent rate estimated as
necessary to reach the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals and substantially
reduce poverty. Progress in achieving the U.N. goals is seen as critical to the
economic diversification needed to sustain Africa's long-term growth trajectory,
since much of the recent boost in earnings is attributable to rising commodity
prices.
Flu pandemic that wasn't. Public health officials girded for an expected avian
flu pandemic possibly of the scale of the astonishingly lethal 1918 influenza,
and by May 308 human cases had been reported in a dozen countries, a majority of
them fatal; but the firewall of preparedness plans put in place under prodding
from the World Health Organization appeared to hold, and rapid suppression of
sporadic outbreaks in poultry was successful in preventing a pandemic.
Holding the nuclear line. The Bush administration won agreement with North
Korea, under cover of six-party talks, to dismantle the DPRK's nuclear weapons
capability, and discovered that the Europeans had won abandonment of Iran's
nuclear weapons program four years ago - though Tehran must still resolve a
number of major issues with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Perhaps less
agreeable to the administration, leftist lawmakers in India scuppered
Washington's nuclear deal with New Delhi, lawmakers in Washington eliminated
funding for nuclear weapons development at home, and for the first time in
twenty years some leading presidential candidates vowed elimination of nuclear
weapons, a position politically decontaminated in Washington security circles by
its January endorsement by Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and George
Shultz.
Human rights campaign against executions ascendant. By a vote of 104 to 54, the
U.N. General Assembly for the first time called for a moratorium on executions,
stigmatizing the death penalty as a violation against human rights; the United
States joined China, Iran, Nigeria, Singapore, and Sudan in defending the
sovereign right of states to impose death as a vital crime-control measure.
Simultaneously at home, New Jersey repealed the death penalty, and declining
application of the death penalty in other states left Texas as the state
responsible for the majority of U.S. executions.
Japan moves to the center. Defeated in House of Councillor elections, the ruling
Liberal Democratic Party replaced the abrasively nationalist prime minister
Shinzo Abe with the more traditionally centrist Yasuo Fukuda, who halted his two
predecessors' practice of provocative visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to honor
Japan's wartime leaders, backpedaled from their embrace of an anti-Chinese
Asia-Pacific axis, and sought to placate Okinawans outraged by the doctoring of
history textbooks to conceal militarist responsibility for mass wartime
"suicides."
Realists recapture U.S. foreign policy. The flight of the Vulcans most
identified with the Bush administration's bellicose unilateralism and its
invasion of Iraq, increasingly evident since the 2006 congressional elections,
put control of foreign policy firmly in the hands of conservative realists; an
engaging new representative at the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, ended
America's humiliating isolation in the General Assembly, and the new secretary
of defense, Robert Gates, stunned Washington by pressing for an increase in the
State Department's budget as vital to American security.
Time-out on trade liberalization. As concerns intensified worldwide about
growing income inequality, falling incomes and benefits for workers in developed
countries, inadequate product safety regulation, and debilitating financial
viruses spread by deregulation, nations put the brakes on new free trade pacts
and groped with scant success for effective ways to regulate problem areas in
the international economy. The U.S. Congress denied President Bush new
"fast-track" authority and approved just one of the four bilateral
free-trade pacts he had already negotiated (with labor and environmental
obligations he had previously eschewed), China adopted stronger labor market
protections in the face of growing worker restiveness, and Africans spurned E.U.
calls for regional trade agreements.
The Worst of 2007
Afghanistan on the brink. The government of President Hamid Karzai confounded
many pessimists simply by surviving 2007, but successes scored by resurgent
Taliban across much of southern Afghanistan, the reluctance of several NATO
allies to commit troops to combat operations there, and the growing calls in
Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands to curtail their troops' combat involvement
sooner rather than later, put in doubt the current strategy to make the Afghan
state and economy self-sustaining.
Darfur's deliverance delayed. Profiting from divisions among Darfur's
quarrelsome rebel groups, the Islamist government in Khartoum spent 2007
stonewalling the deployment in western Sudan of the U.N.-African peacekeeping
force the U.N. Security Council had authorized in 2006, prompting the head of
U.N. peacekeeping to declare with uncharacteristic bluntness that Khartoum was
seeking to "make it impossible for the mission to operate." But on
December 31 the United Nations took over command and financing of the African
peacekeepers already in place anyway.
Democracy besieged. The backlash in power circles against democracy (and,
perhaps, its ham-handed promotion by Washington) took its toll as Russians voted
their acquiescence in the Kremlin's effective restoration of authoritarian rule;
the collapse of a painstakingly assembled and democratically elected Palestinian
"unity" government sparked an armed takeover of Gaza by Hamas
militias; Egypt's elections to the consultative upper house of parliament were
marked by intimidation, arrests, and beatings of opposition parliamentarians;
and the incumbent's suspicious erasure of Kenyan presidential challenger Raila
Odinga's victory margin exposed the fragility of reliable democratic
institutions in multi-ethnic African polities.
Dollar descendant. Mounting fiscal imbalances in the United States propelled a
continuing descent of the dollar against other leading currencies - most
spectacularly against the euro (down 10.6 percent, after a similar decline in
2006) and even the Canadian "loonie" (down 18.6 percent). With shrewd
financial packagers having successfully exported many of the losses from
America's subprime mortgage collapse, international investors' confidence in the
credibility of U.S. financial instruments declined, international creditors have
become more leery of investments denominated in inexorably depreciating dollars,
and the risk of the dollar's displacement as the world's reserve currency has
grown.
Food scarcity looming. An "unforeseen and unprecedented" depletion of
world grain reserves developed over the course of the year, the U.N.'s Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned before Christmas, with the FAO's overall
food price index shooting up more than 40 percent and the market price for wheat
jumping 52 percent in a year, with wheat futures in the United States topping
$10 a bushel. The Rome-based agency warned of spreading food riots as the poor
are priced out of the food market, adding a security dimension to a humanitarian
challenge; the growing diversion of grain from food to ethanol production is
counted one of the causes of vanishing grain stocks, not least by pasta
producers fending off Italians irate at sharp increases in pasta prices.
Iraq paralysis deepens. The large American troop reinforcement in central Iraq
was credited with breaking the back of the spiraling escalation of death tolls
in a country that has become almost uncontrollably violent since the invasion
that toppled the Ba'athist regime. But the faith-based political chasm
separating Shiite clerical parties that dominate Baghdad's post-invasion
politics from once-secular Sunnis has only widened, Washington's benchmarks for
political and economic progress have been disregarded, and its coalition allies
have made for the exits even as the Bush administration begins pressing the
Green Zone government for a security pact to keep U.S. troops in the country for
the long term.
Pakistan's nuclear meltdown. The clumsy efforts of Pakistan's Washington-backed
military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, to prolong his deeply unpopular hold on power
backfired badly, provoking even the long docile judiciary and legal profession
into open opposition and inspiring huge turnouts to welcome back long exiled
(and demonized) civilian political leaders. Washington's scheme to salvage the
general's toxic rule by pressing cohabitation on Benazir Bhutto proved
unworkable, and her assassination at year's end seemed sure to put the
nuclear-armed and Islamist-ridden country into meltdown.
Qaeda extends its reach. Attacks by Islamic extremists re-branding themselves as
al Qaeda local affiliates rocked Algeria, Iraq, Gaza, and Somalia, and fizzled
in London only because of dumb luck; the persistence and spread of jihadist
terrorism suggested that American and international measures to suppress the
network have been inadequate to the challenge, and of course Osama bin Laden
remains at large six years after the World Trade Center attacks.
Russia poses stiffened challenges. After years of smarting from Washington's
dismissive disregard for Russia's shriveled influence as it reeled from
post-Soviet "shock therapy," Vladimir Putin's insistence on its
treatment as an indispensable power fanned public support at home and public
concerns in Washington. He adamantly opposed U.S. plans to implant antimissile
systems in former Warsaw Pact countries as a breach of post-cold war
understandings, repudiated the treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe,
tapped swelling oil and gas revenues to rebuild Russia's faded military,
derailed Kosovo's independence from Serbia, and balked at a third round of
nuclear-aimed sanctions against Iran.
Security for sale. Repeated killings of Iraqi civilians by aggressive private
security contractors working for companies such as Blackwater and Aegis shone a
glaring spotlight on the development of a costly private security establishment
exempt from military law and the laws of the countries where such forces are
deployed, a trend that Congress belatedly began to notice and that United
Nations bodies have begun to question as risky resort to
"mercenaries."
JeffreyLaurenti@MaximsNews.com
Labels: United
Nations, U.N., Jeffrey
Laurenti, Century
Foundation, Best
and Worst of 2007
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