Americas Articles

Alongside the proliferation of international treaties over the past half-century, an ongoing debate has grown in the United States over whether US courts should operate as part of an international system of law or remain an isolated entity. In a landmark ruling on June 29, 2004, the US Supreme Court upheld that US federal courts are open to hear complaints over violations of international law, thus allowing foreign victims of serious human rights abuses to sue individuals or companies in US courts.

In the summer of 2004, the US National Committee on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (“the 9/11 Commission”) released its final report explaining why the United States was blindsided by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and what improvements the United States could make to reduce the chances of another catastrophic terrorist attack on US soil. The Commission went to great lengths to identify the shortcomings of the US governmental system that allowed the attacks to occur. Despite the Commission’s efforts, one important topic remained outside the scope of their report: the intellectual mindset that guides US national security strategy.

The discovery of new non-renewable natural resources, such as oil, natural gas, and minerals, has often been viewed as a sure-fire foundation for national development. Those countries lucky enough to strike black gold, or gold itself, see themselves as having taken the first important step on the road to prosperity. Therefore, it is not surprising that many have placed their hopes in resource exploitation as the means for lifting out of poverty a large proportion of the 2.7 billion people (nearly half of the world’s population) who live on less than US$2 per day.

Why, despite their professed similarity of goals, do the policy preferences of the European Union and the United States diverge on so many multilateral issues? This puzzling central question, posed by David Hannay, a former UK Ambassador to the United Nations, caught the attention of Thomas Mowle. These words became the guiding line for this trendsetting book, brilliantly and objectively written, and extremely well-organized. Allies at Odds?