Author Archives: lawac
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After a summer where every week seemed to bring a new foreign policy crisis, the fall season is upon us, and the Los Angeles World Affairs Council has a series of interesting programs coming up between now and the holidays.Top of the list will be a lunch with former President Bill Clinton on November 10th – tickets for that event will go on sale in a couple of weeks.
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With 175 million people and a $500 billion GDP which has overtaken South Africa to make it the largest economy in Africa, Nigeria has enormous potential. But as Governor Isa Yuguda from the north eastern Nigerian state of Bauchi conceded on Friday at a LAWAC lunch, the country also faces significant problems, from the extremist Boko Haram militants who kidnap schoolchildren to rampant financial corruption and, not least, the threatening specter of the Ebola epidemic that has been growing in west Africa.
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Senator Tom Udall made a spirited argument in favor of protecting both our freedoms and at the same time our security, implicated Russia in the downing of the Malaysian passenger jet, and said that the only conceivable way to end the wars in Syria and Iraq in the near term would be to send in US troops, but that nobody in the US, in or out of government, wanted to do that.
The world needs an open China, and China needs to open to the world, said China’s Minister of Culture, Cai Wu, at a dinner with the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Wednesday. China cannot achieve its dreams simply through economic growth, impressive though that has been in the past three decades, but must also foster cultural prosperity.
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Europe is now facing its most difficult security crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and despite criticism that is has not done enough to help Ukraine, “I can assure you that we will be tough on Mr Putin,” said João Vale de Almeida, the European Union Ambassador to the United States.
The image of Mexico in the US is outdated and fails to match what is going on inside the country today, where $1.25 billion of trade is done every day with the US, where long term monopolies in oil and telecoms have been opened up to private competition by the new government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, and where – believe it or not – the world’s largest number of hot dogs are produced.
The pace and complexity of modern warfare has increased to a point where it requires different models of leadership to prosecute wars, General Stanley McChrystal told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Thursday. The General, a former head of the Joint Special Operations Command and former US commander in Afghanistan, said that US Special Forces are incontestably the best in the world, but that doesn’t mean they are a panacea for all our problems overseas, and he also advocated strongly for a one-year system of national service – not necessarily military – for all young people in the US.
One of the exciting parts of working with the Los Angeles World Affairs Council is reacting to world events and planning programs around them – and these past few months have been particularly eventful. The world has been riveted by the drama playing out in Ukraine after the fall of President Yanukovych and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the Council we heard in March from Georgetown University’s Angela Stent who has been studying Russia for three decades that “Putin gets what Putin wants,” and a week later John McCain argued forcibly that the US should make sure Putin does NOT get what he wants – even if that means sending weapons to Ukraine.
Markus Meckel, a member of the German parliament for two decades, said he was “not sure” that Russian President Putin was still acting rationally, and strongly criticized businessmen in Germany who have been resisting the imposition of sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea.
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