Washington's Policy Research Articles

Coordinating the arm swing with the pivot: nuclear deterrence, stability and US strategy in the Asia-Pacific

United States’ foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region is set to be fundamentally altered by two developments in Washington's defence policy. The first is the so-called pivot towards the region in terms of overall defence strategy. The second, occurring at roughly the same time, is a move towards a far greater role for advanced conventional weaponry in the US defence posture. We analyse the interaction of these two trends and discusses a central tension between short and long-term challenges, suggesting that, contrary to current developments, either a freeze in the deployment of these weapons programmes or a return to a strategy underpinned by traditional notions of deterrence may well be necessary.

Japan in the Russia - U.S. Relations

The article examines the impact of the crisis in Russia - U. S. relations in connection with the events surrounding Ukraine on the world system and its key component - the Asia-Pacific region where Japan plays a crucial role. The author assumes that the international relations have no common understanding of the rules of engagement between the USA, the Group of Seven, Russia and the BRICS countries. As a result, the leading countries of the world are guided by conflicting scenarios. The article deals with the American scenario in relation to China and the Russian Federation and the Russian one in relation to polycentric and the U. S. - centered world orders. The most important element of the American scenario in relation to Beijing is Japan. This country is central to Washington's policy to contain China. Tokyo is headed for the rapid rejection of pacifist principles of its foreign policy. Russian scenario for the international system is in an active course to establishing a polycentric world order. United States' scenario against Russia in this regard is a containment strategy of Moscow. The central component of this strategy, as it can be assumed, is a violation of the strategic balance in US - Russian relations. However, Ukraine has become a major springboard to contain Russia. Instead of establishing equal Russian - American relations United States and their allies (under American pression) have chosen a policy of isolating Moscow, but such actions are blocking the Russian - Japanese rapprochement beneficial both for Tokyo and Kremlin, which is interested in deepening its ties with Japan in order to diversify its relations with Asia-Pacific area. The author concludes that the long-term interests of Russia and Japan dictate both sides to move closer, but the policy of the U.S. administration towards Russia on the Ukranian question blocks this possibility.

Acknowledgments

Previous articleNext article FreeAcknowledgmentsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor 29 years, the National Bureau of Economic Research has sponsored the Tax Policy and Economy conference in Washington, DC. Each year, NBER researchers bring rigorous research to bear on policy-relevant questions and disseminate their results to the economic policy community by presenting at this conference and publishing in this volume. In return, Washington-based economists and other participants in the policy process provide valuable insights to the academic researchers, not only about the research itself, but also about the political economy environment in which policies are proposed, evaluated, and implemented.This valuable interaction is made possible by the hard work of many individuals. Carl Beck, Lita Kimble, and especially Rob Shannon once again provided truly professional handling of all conference planning and logistics. They truly are the dream team for any conference organizer. Helena Fitzpatrick provided expert guidance through the publication process. And, of course, our NBER President Jim Poterba has been a strong supporter of this conference for more than two decades, and this year was no exception. I also thank the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation for its continued financial support.I am especially grateful to the authors, whose research is the raison d’être for this conference. Collectively, the authors spend hundreds of hours producing research that helps to inform some of the most consequential policy discussions of our time. Equally important are the many individuals in the Washington policy community who actively participate in the conference with probing questions and comments, and who incorporate the research lessons into their important roles in the policy process.A highlight of each year’s conference is the keynote speaker. This year, we were honored to have Jim Stock of Harvard University and the NBER, who had just recently returned to academia after serving on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. His discussion focused on the sources and implications of long-term trends in GDP growth. A particularly remarkable feature of the data he shared is the decline in GDP growth rates (not just levels) following recessions, a finding that is important for understanding the slow recovery from the Great Recession as well as expectations about future growth. I am grateful that Jim was willing to accept our invitation for the second year in a row: his 2013 keynote was cancelled due to the untimely government shutdown and the limitations that this placed on government officials. His presentation, which was packed with substance and rigor, was well worth the wait. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Tax Policy and the Economy Volume 29, Number 12015 Sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/683361 © 2015 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Новые аспекты дискурса о “реальполитик” Берлина

The article investigates approaches taken by major political parties and civil society in the FRG toward the Transatlantic partnership. It reveals the tendencies of the prospective promotion of Berlin’s cooperation with Washington; the article also gives a forecast of further interaction between the EU and the USA, indicates the direction of discourse regarding the future Russia–Germany relations model in the context of the Ukrainian crisis and in reference to the increased transatlantic solidarity. Disputes in German socio-political circles on the issue of the FRG’s policy toward the U.S. are emerging all the time, but they have to be considered within a concrete historical and political context. Being of primary significance for all German chancellors, the Trans-Atlantic factor has been shaping itself in a controversial way as to the nation’s public opinion. This has been confirmed by many opinion polls, including the survey on the signing of the EU–U.S. Agreement on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Chancellor A. Merkel is playing an important role: she is either ascribed full compliancy with Washington, or is being tentatively shown as a consistent government figure in advancing and upholding of Germany's and the EU's interests. A. Merkel has implemented her peace-seeking drive in undoing the Ukrainian tangle by setting up the “Normandy format” involving the leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine while having cleared it through with the U.S. President B. Obama well in advance. Despite the increasing criticism of Washington’s policy among some part of Germans, for the majority of German voters, the USA remains a country of implementable hopes, the only power in the world possessing a high education level and the most advanced technologies. Americans, for their part, are confident of the important role that Berlin plays in world politics, particularly in what concerns the maintenance of unity within the EU. Berlin aims at further constructive interaction with the USA in the frame of NATO as well as within other Trans-Atlantic formats. Notwithstanding the steady tendency toward increasing of the Washington policy’s critical perception degree in German society, officially Berlin continues as Washington’s true ally, partner and friend. There is every reason to believe that after the 2017 Bundestag elections, the new (the former) Chancellor will have to face a modernized Trans-Atlantic partnership philosophy, with a paradigm also devised in the spirit of the bloc discipline and commitments to allies. The main concern for Berlin is not to lose its sovereign right of decision-making, including the one that deals with problems of European security and relations with Moscow. Regrettably, Germany is not putting forward any innovative ideas on aligning a new architecture of European security with Russia’s participation. Meanwhile, German scholars and experts are trying to work out a tentative algorithm of a gradual return to the West’s full-fledged dialogue with Russia, which, unfortunately, is qualified as an opponent by many politicians. Predictably, the Crimea issue will remain a long-lasting political irritant in relations between Russia and Germany. Although not every aspect of Berlin’s activation in its foreign policy finds support of the German public, and the outburst of anti-American feeling is obvious, experts believe that the government of the FRG is “merely taking stock of these phenomena and ignores them”. Evident is the gap between the government's line and the feeling of the German parties’ basis – the public. It is noteworthy that the FRG has not yet adopted the Law on Holding General Federal Referendums on key issues of the domestic and foreign policy. There is every indication to assume that the real causes of abandoning the nationwide referendums are the reluctance of the German ruling bureaucracy and even its apprehensions of the negative voting returns on sensitive problems, – such as basic documents and decisions of the EU, the export of German arms, relations with the U.S., etc. The harmony between Berlin’s "Realpolitik" and German public opinion is not yet discernible within the system of Trans-Atlantic axes.

Dialogue of the Deaf: Scholars, Practitioners, and the Drug War in U.S. Foreign Relations

In this paper I offer some Washington-focused reflections on the scholarly-policy divide in the drug war debate, drawing from more than two decades of observing and occasionally participating in what often seems to be a dialogue of the deaf — or perhaps the problem is not lack of hearing but not liking what one hears. Academics, I argue, have little discernible influence on the Washington policy debate on international drug control except at the margins (in technical aspects of crop substitution schemes, and so on). To the extent that scholars are involved in the foreign policy drug war debate — and there are plenty of disciplinary factors inhibiting this — it is primarily as outside critics rather than as trusted advisors. So to the extent that they have a receptive audience, it is more in the broader public sphere than in the halls of Congress or in the drug war bureaucracy. Their policy influence is therefore more indirect and more difficult to measure, though this does not mean it is necessarily unimportant.

Diamonds and Genocide

The Second Congo War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (The Congo) has been the largest humanitarian crisis in the last decade. Over five million people have died, and millions more have been displaced. During the conflict, the ostensibly neutral United States subtly sided with Rwanda and Uganda at the expense of the Congolese President Laurent Kabila. I test whether the media indexed their coverage to Washington policy. However, I expand my analysis to compare coverage leading in British and French newspapers as well. After careful examination, I discover that there is no significant difference in reporting. However, the real question of bias and framing includes issues of neutrality, the prominence of linking the Second Congo War with the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the persistent underreporting of economic exploitation that underpinned the violence.

Turkish Foreign Policy toward the Iranian Nuclear Programme: In Search of a New Middle East Order after the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War

Turkey's role in the Iranian nuclear dossier is often portrayed as that of a 'facilitator' and 'mediator' in scholarly analyses. NATO member Turkey was seen as a potential bridge-builder between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the 'Western camp' of negotiators. During prime minister Erdogan's first legislature, however, Ankara's and Washington's foreign policy outlooks and strategic priorities started to diverge in the course of Turkey's new regional engagement in what has been theorized as a 'Middle-Easternization' of Turkish foreign policy. It is Turkey's location as a geostrategic hub in a politically instable region that informed Turkey's 'Zero problems with neighbors' policy and foreign minister Davutoglu's advocacy for a 'Strategic Depth' in Turkey's foreign and regional policies. Ankara emphasizes its need to uphold sound relations with its neighbors and publicly stresses an unwillingness to go along with Western pressure on Iran, and insists on the principle of non-interference and Iran's right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes. All the same, Turkish-Iranian relations are undergoing a deterioration in the wake of the Syrian civil war at the time of writing, with both sides supporting diametrically opposite causes and factions. Turkish-Iranian fundamentally differing conceptions of regional order will also impact upon Turkey's leverage power to defuse the Iranian nuclear crisis. This paper therefore adds a timely contribution to our understanding of a multifaceted and nuanced Turkish foreign policy toward Iran that can be a critical complement to 'Western' diplomatic initiatives in the search for new paradigms for a new Middle East order.

China's rise in space and US policy responses: A collision course?

China's opaque politics present particular difficulties for US space policy. Heavily invested in and reliant on space, the US will closely monitor China's burgeoning space program. New space powers, and the increasing use of space generally will further create significant challenges, most particularly to the reliance of states on space for national security. In order to maintain its space capabilities, the US will have to decide between securing this via multilateral and co-operative uses of space, or through trying to maintain a level of dominance over other space actors. While very gradually shifting away from the latter position, Washington's policy choices are complicated by the lack of a clear Chinese space strategy. While the Chinese space program, and its wider intentions, are opaque, tenure of a more cooperative approach course might prove fragile.

The Fall of Mosaddeq, August 1953: Institutional Narratives, Professor Mark Gasiorowski and My Study

Over the decades that followed the overthrow of Mosaddeq in August 1953 a narrative attributing the fall exclusively to foreign conspiracy has taken hold and become institutionalized. In this narrative the internal factors are reduced to the simplest level of abstraction. They do not exist outside foreign conspiracy! This narrative is premised on an Anglo-American coup plot code-named TP-AJAX that was attempted in the late hours of 15 August but failed. The ensuing flight of the Shah generated dynamics which led to the fall of Mosaddeq four days later. The CIA chief operative in Tehran Kermit Roosevelt was quick to take credit claiming that these dynamics were inseminated by his ingenious and spontaneous planning. For abiding internal reasons both the CIA and the MI6 headquarters preferred to claim victory rather than admit failure. Evidence that emerged following the declassification of the State Department papers in 1989 and the leak of a secret CIA internal history in 2000 produced glaring evidence that the fall of Mosaddeq on 19 August 1953 had taken Washington, even its embassy in Tehran, by complete surprise and that post facto claims by Roosevelt were inconsistent both with Washington's explicit policy directives and Roosevelt's own situation reports filed with the CIA Washington during the interval between the two events. Roosevelt later published a phantasmagorical account of the event which, together with reminiscences of a few unnamed former operatives, was given credence by Professor Gasiorowski and associates, who curiously chose to ignore archival evidence.

Misplaced Multiculturalism: Representations of American Indians in U.S. History Academic Content Standards

This qualitative textual analysis investigates the ideological lenses through which U.S. History content standards for grades 5–12 for Arizona and Washington frame interactions between American Indians and European Americans during U.S. national development. The study’s multiperspective critical conceptual framework interrogates the standards not only on the basis of inclusion of American Indians in curriculum content, but also on the different ways in which this inclusion challenges, problematizes, or disrupts simplistic social representations in curriculum documents. The analysis reveals stark differences between how the respective state education policy makers conceptualize American Indian–European American interactions. In Arizona historical content is the curriculum, while in Washington historical content informs the curriculum, which is geared toward critical reflectiveness about public policy issues. Both standards documents ultimately fall short in promoting critical thinking about American Indian–European American interactions because they succumb to separate pratfalls of multicultural inclusion orthodoxy. Arizona policy makers tend to shoehorn content on American Indians into a singular and simplistic narrative of U.S. economic, political, and social development, while Washington policy makers tend to construct artificial social binaries to create an accessible and relevant narrative template. The standards documents exemplify the zero‐sum nature of curricular politics, wherein we can learn as much about a society’s ascendant values from what gets excluded from the curriculum as from what gets included in the curriculum.

Commentary: Obama’s Latin America Policy

When Latin America's left presidents watched the campaign of Barack Obama for president in 2008, they thought that they might finally see a U.S. president who would change Washington's foreign policy in the region. It seemed as if another revolt the ballot box was arriving in the Western Hemisphere of the kind that had elected Lula da Silva, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Fernando Lugo, and Tabare Vazquez. Before Obama's election, President Lula da Silva of Brazil expressed this sentiment (Weisbrot, 2008a): Just as Brazil elected a metal worker, Bolivia elected an Indian, Venezuela elected Chavez, and Paraguay a bishop, I think that it would be an extraordinary thing if, in the largest economy in the world, a black man were elected president of the United States. In a sense, the shift in the electorate had similar causes in the hemi sphere. Latin America's swing to the left was largely driven by the failure of neoliberalism: the worst long-term economic growth performance in more than a century, from 1980 to 2000 (Weisbrot, 2007). More than a gen eration of Latin Americans had lost out on any chance to improve their liv ing standards. In the case of the United States it was not so much a growth failure (although the growth of per capita gross domestic product did decline significantly in the neoliberal era [Baker, 2007]) as a vast increase in inequality and, of course, the worst recession since the Great Depression that finally brought voters to demand an end to nearly four decades of rightward drift (Weisbrot, 2008b). A few months after taking office, in April 2009, Obama seemed to raise Latin America's expectations the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. Acting like the former community organizer he was, Obama walked over to shake hands with Chavez—an image that sped instantly around the world and infuriated the right. He made some unprecedented statements for a U.S. president, admitting that at times we sought to dictate our terms (Obama, 2009a). Even Raul Castro was impressed, responding to Obama's loosening of travel and remittance restrictions (for Cuban-Americans only) by saying that he was ready to discuss rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, everything. He added, could be wrong. We admit it. We're human beings (Carroll, 2009).

From the Latent to the Manifest: US Strategic Interests in the Gulf of Guinea

Until recently, Africa and indeed the Gulf of Guinea was not central to the United S tates' foreign policy objectives. However, events in the Persian Gulf (most of the world's lar gest oil reserves and the lar gest supplies of the US energy needs) corroborated by the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, necessitated a re- appraisal of Washington's policy towards the sub-region. Given that the Gulf of Guinea already supplies about 17 percent of US energy needs, the need to consolidate her presence in the sub-region became imperative. This paper traces the evolution of US presence in the Gulf of Guinea against the backdrop of the quest for the ener gy security . It also examines the impact of the competition between the US and her closest rivals in the region and its grave security concerns. Finally, the paper suggests that collaboratory ef fort by the stakeholders in the sub-region is the best way to mitigate the development challenges of the area.

In the Game

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, White House aides, and members of Congress have been working behind the scenes for months on a rewrite of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. But one of the key players in the negotiations is an earnest, high-energy mother of two young children who is hardly known outside of Washington: Bethany Little, the top education advisor to Sen. Tom Harkin (D Iowa), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). On Harkin's behalf, Little has been managing ESEA deliberations not only among Senate Democrats, but also with the chamber's Re publicans. She is often Harkin's emissary to Democratic allies in the White House and the Department of Education and to the many education organizations seeking to influence the ESEA reauthorization. Eventually, she'll be negotiating with the new Republican education leaders in the House, where some recently elected members have been pushing to end the Department of Education's cabinet status. A quintessentially Washington career path brought Little, now 37, to this role. She came to D.C. from Miami, Fla., to attend Georgetown University, got into politics, and stayed. She did advance work for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign in 1996. After a stint at a good government nonprofit, she landed a political appointment at the Department of Education and then moved to the White House domestic policy staff for two years, leaving on the last day of the second Clinton Administration. She moved up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, where she represented Sen. Patty Murray (D Washington) in drafting NCLB. Little left the grinding pace of Hill life and the minority status of Senate Democrats to have children, now ages six and two. During that time, she became director of government relations at the nonprofit Children's Defense Fund and then vice president for policy and federal advocacy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, another Washington policy and advocacy group. When Democrats won back control of the Congress and Obama won the White House, the top education policy person on the Senate HELP committee, Carmel Martin, became Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the chair of the HELP committee, offered Little Martin's former job. After a long conversation with her husband about parenting and the demands of two unrelenting Washington jobs--her husband is director of public affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency and travels regularly--she returned to the Hill. And when Harkin took over the committee after Kennedy's death, he kept Little on. Little now works out of a cramped HELP education suite on the 6th floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. She manages a staff of 10 with a policy portfolio that extends from early childhood education to college student aid and workforce development. ESEA a Priority While the HELP committee's work runs the education gamut, the reauthorization of ESEA, the major federal public education law, consumes Little's time. And though she helped write the last edition of the law a decade ago, she's quick to point out what she sees as its flaws: an overly rigid accountability system that favors affluent schools and imposes the same sanctions on slightly underperforming schools as on failing schools; ineffective school choice and tutoring programs; unintended incentives for states to lower standards; and not enough attention to the key issue of teacher quality. Little and her colleagues are using the Obama Administration's blueprint, released over a year ago, as the source for many of the changes that she's negotiating. The Administration wants to maintain the NCLB mandate that states test students annually in a number of grades and report results by race and other categories because they want to ensure that school districts pay more attention to the poor, students of color, and other often overlooked groups. …

Part I: Government information: Adding value as an expert guide

Part I: Government information: Adding value as an expert guide

Incorporating WASHINGTON NEWS and policy news from around the world

Incorporating WASHINGTON NEWS and policy news from around the world

The immigrant divide: how Cuban Americans changed the US and their homeland

Are all immigrants from the same home country best understood as a homogeneous group of foreign-born? Or do they differ in their adaptation and transnational ties depending on when they emigrated and with what lived experiences? Between Castro’s rise to power in 1959 and the early twenty-first century more than a million Cubans immigrated to the United States. While it is widely known that Cuban emigres have exerted a strong hold on Washington policy toward their homeland, Eckstein uncovers a fascinating paradox: the recent arrivals, although poor and politically weak, have done more to transform their homeland than the influential and prosperous early exiles who have tried for half a century to bring the Castro regime to heel. The impact of the so-called New Cubans is an unintended consequence of the personal ties they maintain with family in Cuba, ties the first arrivals oppose. This historically-grounded, nuanced book offers a rare in-depth analysis of Cuban immigrants’ social, cultural, economic, and political adaptation, their transformation of Miami into the northern most Latin American city, and their cross-border engagement and homeland impact. Eckstein accordingly provides new insight into the lives of Cuban immigrants, into Cuba in the post Soviet era, and into how Washington’s failed Cuba policy might be improved. She also posits a new theory to deepen the understanding not merely of Cuban but of other immigrant group adaptation.

Measuring the Influence of Think Tanks

It is difficult to present great conclusions about the influence of thinks tanks. The major think tanks have earned an important presence in the Washington policy community. In the words of one political scientist, “Power in Washington cannot be measured precisely, yet think tanks surely have a good deal for it …” The major think tanks are important sources of information to the media, the government, and to a host of interest groups involved in the public policy process. The result is a lively competition of ideas in the policy arena.

The United States in Asia

The United States in Asia. By Robert G. Sutter. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Softcover: 303pp. The ongoing debate over America's leadership role in Asia has been heated since the end of the Bush administration. Robert G. Sutter's book makes three important contributions to this debate. First, he evaluates the history of US relations with Asia; second, he examines US policy priorities towards major Asian countries; and third, he identifies the international strategies of Asian governments and their objectives and expectations regarding their relations with the United States. By connecting the past with the present, and comparing and contrasting the perspectives and policy choices of the United States and Asian countries, Sutter contextualizes America's prominent role in the complex and rapidly evolving economic, political and security environment of the Asia-Pacific region. In doing so, Sutter directly challenges the view that US leadership in the region is in decline. The book can be divided into four main parts. The first part (Chapter 1) establishes US policy objectives in Asia. Sutter convincingly argues that over the course of more than 200 years of engagement with Asia, the United States has pursued three longstanding goals, namely (i) maintaining a balance of power favourable to it, (ii) promoting US economic interests, and (iii) spreading American values. Every administration, however, has prioritized these three objectives differently. The second part (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) analyses current US interests and concerns in Asia. Using a priority list, Sutter puts China and the Korean Peninsula at the top, followed by Japan and then Southeast Asia. Sutter skillfully and meticulously frames US policy choices towards these countries with reference to the discourse between governmental and non-governmental actors in the United States. This approach enables the author to capture the influence of domestic politics in US policy towards Asia and how Washington's policy choices are often governed by domestic political and economic interests rather than in reaction to regional trends or changes in the policies of Asian governments. In the third part (Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8), Sutter goes on to identify the determinants of Asian governments' policy calculations towards America as well as their priorities and concerns. The author draws attention to the interesting contradiction between the attention that countries in the region devote to US economic, political and security policies and objectives--which are considered the main factors regional policy-makers must take account of- and the fact that these policies and objectives constitute something of a riddle for outsiders to understand. …

Conference report: Reinvesting in America: The New Metropolitan Planning Agenda, 50th Annual ACSP Conference, Crystal City, Virginia, 1–4 October 2009

In keeping with the theme of 'the new metropolitan planning agenda,' the 50th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) met in the Washington DC metropolitan region, in Crystal City, Virginia, 1-4 October 2009. The 2009 conference marked a half-century of ACSP meetings to discuss the scholarly, pedagogical, and administrative concerns of planning and planning education. Fortuitously, the conference also coincided with two other important benchmarks for planning as a discipline and profession in the US. The first National Conference on City Planning was held in Washington, DC in 1909, making 2009 the 100th anniversary of the organised planning movement in the US; and 25 years ago, in 1984, ACSP, the American Planning Association (APA), and the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) came together to create the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), the organisation that oversees quality control in planning education in the US. Additionally, 5 October 2009 - the day after the ACSP conference - was World Habitat Day (WHD). The organisers of WHD, United Nations Habitat, chose Washington, DC to host the 2009 WHD and many events of interest to planners were scheduled. The metaphorical Washington and the conference theme Metropolitan issues have come to the forefront of the national policy agenda as the US elected its first 'urban' president in decades. Among other things, the new administration has created an Office of Urban Policy and is pushing for rebuilding the nation through urban investments of all types, from traditional public works to green technologies. Washington's main target for this rebuilding is metropolitan regions. The historic urban/suburban divide is fading as urbanising suburbs recognise their increasing stake in creating denser, more sustainable, more 'city-like' development across the metropolitan region. The conference theme of the new metropolitan planning agenda reflects a policy environment in Washington that is more favourable to planning than at any time in at least 40 years. Expanding federal support aims to recharge the economy by improving and making more sustainable the nation's metropolitan infrastructure, and at the same time providing increased opportunities for constructive civic engagement. The Washington metropolitan region as conference setting Against the backdrop of a transformed Washington policy environment, the Washington DC metropolitan region provided a powerful setting for conference participants to explore planning ideas. The region has a rich tradition in planning, from L'Enfant's city plan to the monumental public buildings to contemporary transit-oriented developments, smart growth policies, and farmland and Chesapeake Bay protection efforts. At the same time, the region faces numerous challenges. The status of Washington, DC as a federal city within a metropolitan region that spans across two states (Maryland and Virginia) presents serious governance issues. The region ranks second in the US in traffic congestion, yet has one of most heavily utilised public transit systems. It is also grappling with the rapid growth of an extremely diverse population. For example, just since 2000, 250,000 international immigrants have settled in the region. It is one of the mostly highly educated and high-income regions in the US, and also has a large number of poor people. These and other contrasting realities of the Washington metropolitan region were well-explored through a number of panels and mobile workshops organised by the three local host university planning programmes - Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University. They included, for example, panels on federal transportation and housing policy, the politics of metropolitan reinvestment, green buildings and infrastructure, and community development in immigrant suburbia; and mobile workshops on contrasting approaches to land use, bike-friendly communities, waterfront development, and greening public schools. …

Hiroshima and Spinning the Atom: America, Britain, and Canada Proclaim the Nuclear Age, 6 August 1945

When the Manhattan Project accelerated from theoretical physics to the actual engineering phase of the atomic bomb, Washington policy makers were determined to gain a propaganda advantage. Although...