ILF POST

By Harlan Cleveland We have recently watched two groups of presidential candidates, standing stiffly in rows on a stage, trying (not very successfully) to look like our potential Presidents. There must be a better way!
Election time U.S.A. should be our leaders’ greatest opportunity for civic education. The attention of the people, and the media, [...]

By Harlan Cleveland When it’s not the season for hurricanes, we seem to forget all about them. Outside New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, even the memory of Katrina is fading fast.
Who remembers Agnes in 1972, which produced Appalachian floods, 122 deaths, and $3 billion damage? Or David in September 1979, which bounced through the [...]

By Harlan Cleveland I was invited late last month to explain the history of The Marshall Plan in 15 minutes at the Secretary of State’s Open Forum, a monthly affair in the State Department’s Dean Acheson Auditorium. I devoted a few paragraphs to the memorable bipartisanship that characterized what I called “the most ambitious, [...]

By Harlan Cleveland Not long before he died in 1976, Andre Malraux wrote that the 21st century would be the century of religion. If he was guessing that much violence would be justified in the name of organized religions, his forecast has already come true. If he meant that mainstream religions would be attracting more [...]

By Harlan Cleveland If the Baker-Hamilton Report was intended as a bombshell, it was one of the scatter-shot kind that spew shrapnel in all directions. Everyone who has commented seems to feel wounded by one or another piece of it, while praising the pieces that fly in other directions.
-The military proposals focus on training [...]

By Harlan Cleveland The murmur is beginning to sound like a roar. The gap between the rich and the rest keeps getting wider. It’s eating into the American conscience. What should, and can, we do about it?
In his blog in this space a few days ago, Nicholas Johnson cited the sudden spurt in CEO [...]

By Harlan Cleveland To hear Senator Barack Obama say on “Meet the Press” that he was thinking about running for President was not a surprise. It would only have been surprising if he had said it hadn’t occurred to him. What intrigued me was the chorus of punditry that followed. Most [...]

By Harlan Cleveland We have already learned, in more than two centuries of history as a nation, a first lesson about diversity: It can’t be governed by drowning it in “integration.”

I came face to face with this truth when, a third of a century ago, I became president of the University of [...]

By Harlan Cleveland The clumsy unilateralism of the Bush administration has had a curious side-effect: It has enhanced the popularity — both at home and abroad — of building coalitions.
Since our embarrassingly unilateral war in Vietnam, Americans seem to want to act in international affairs with credible partners. That’s why NATO [...]

By Harlan Cleveland Even for Americans who were alive on October 4th, 1957, it’s hard to remember the sense of shock and awe when we heard that the Soviet Union had successfully launched its Sputnik — the first orbital spaceshot that put a human being into outer space. [...]

By Harlan Cleveland When it’s this hot for this long,(101 degrees in Northern Virginia the day this is written),I’m forcibly reminded of my first brush with global warming, just thirty years ago — before all the arguments and long before Al Gore’s slide show.
“It’s happening, and we humans are making [...]

By Harlan Cleveland “The ambitious plans that the president announced to transform American defense proved to be at odds with his bold plan to transform a region.”
“The violent chaos that followed Saddam’s defeat was not a matter of not having a plan but of adhering too rigidly to the wrong one.”
These nuggets of practical wisdom [...]

When President Bush started his second term at the beginning of 2005, and moved Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State, there was some puzzlement about what to do with John Bolton. As an Undersecretary of State, he had already gained much negative repute as a bull in a china shop.
The President was [...]

By Harlan Cleveland It was about time — indeed, it’s long been time for the ‘United States’ to get back in effective touch with ‘Iran’. ‘A few days ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skillfully moved the ‘United States’ off its posture of not talking with ‘Iran’, which has been a [...]

By Harlan Cleveland What I miss these days as an American is a federal government with big ideas — or at least one big idea. In the last quarter of the 20th century, I spent large chunks of my time organizing international think-sessions about the future — that is, the 21st century. During the first [...]

By Harlan Cleveland More and more secrets are spilling onto our bookshelves about how the U. S. government started a war in Iraq it didn’t — and still doesn’t — know how to finish. Each decision along the way was taken behind closed doors — based, we now are told, on intelligence some [...]

By Harlan Cleveland By voting to make criminals of 11-12 million illegal immigrants and whoever cares for them, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives produced by far the largest Hispanic-American street demonstrations in our nation’s history.
The turnout was stunning — half a million in Los Angeles, half a million in Dallas, huge [...]

By Harlan Cleveland Last week in this space, Michael Crichton poked fun at the ownership of information as “idiotic.” I want to agree with him, and carry the argument a step further.
My own interest in this topic was piqued in 1981, when I acquired my first home computer. The ethical dilemma leapt out at me [...]

By Harlan Cleveland Americans, the progeny of immigrants, are arguing once again about immigration policy. The outcome is foreordained: an exercise in contrived ambiguity.On one side of the debate, some political leaders — and the uncounted millions they may represent — want to stop illegal workers from entering the United States. They also [...]

By Harlan Cleveland The “war on terrorism” isn’t going well. There are plenty of things wrong — timing, tactics, competence, leadership. But one of the main troubles, simple yet fundamental, is its name.
Terrorism is not a doctrine, like Communism or Fascism” or “containment,” which led to creating the NATO alliance to frustrate Soviet ambitions. [...]

By Harlan Cleveland The last time I was in India, fifteen months ago, I had a chance to meet and listen to its President, a nuclear scientist who talked about rural poverty, and its Prime Minister, an economist who as Finance Minister in the early 1990s got India moving toward its present [...]