HKS in the News June 13, 2012

1. In a brutal world, a responsibility to protect will stay on the table (Nye) The Daily Star (Lebanon)

2. Who are China's Americaphiles? (Kelman) Federal Computer Week

3. Betsy Myers aims to see more women in corner offices (Myers) The Boston Globe

In a brutal world, a responsibility to protect will stay on the table

The Daily Star (Lebanon)

June 13

Commentary by: Joseph Nye

Topic: Military intervention

When should states intervene militarily to stop atrocities in other countries? The question is an old and well-traveled one. Indeed, it is now visiting Syria. In 1904, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt argued that “there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror” that we should intervene by force of arms. A century earlier, in 1821, as Europeans and Americans debated whether to intervene in Greece’s struggle for independence, President John Quincy Adams warned his fellow Americans about “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

More recently, after a genocide that cost nearly 800,000 lives in Rwanda in 1994, and the slaughter of Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, many people vowed that such atrocities should never again be allowed to occur. When Slobodan Milosevic engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution recognizing the humanitarian catastrophe, but could not agree on a second resolution to intervene, given the threat of a Russian veto. Instead, NATO countries bombed Serbia in an effort that many observers regarded as legitimate but not legal. …

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Who are China's Americaphiles?

Federal Computer Week

June 12

Commentary by: Steven Kelman

Topic: US-China relations

It is virtually impossible to get a reliable answer to a really important question about the US-China relationship: To what extent do the Chinese people admire and respect the US, and to what extent do they see themselves as our adversary, rising while we are declining? How many seek friendship, how many want superiority?

The most obvious reason it is so difficult to answer this question is that there are no opinion polls or independent research to consult. But a second reason is that, unless you speak good Chinese, the people with whom Americans associate in China are inevitably a biased sample of the population – people who speak good enough English to have a real conversation with Americans, and who are sympathetic enough to the US to wish to do so. …

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Betsy Myers aims to see more women in corner offices

The Boston Globe

June 12

Quoted: Betsy Myers MPA 2000

Topic: Women and business leadership

… (Betsy) Myers was chief operating officer and a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and served as a senior official in the Clinton White House. As Myers sees it, her role at Bentley is to push forward the conversation about women and corporate leadership, connect with decision makers across the country, and make it clear why more women in corner offices are good for business.

“Women are no longer an interest group,” Myers said, ticking off her talking points. “Women are 52 percent of the population, a majority in the workforce. Companies that have more women in top positions, and more women on boards, are more profitable.”

Despite advances for women in the workplace, many of the statistics are discouraging. Only 3.6 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs, and women hold only about 14 percent of senior management positions within those companies. Despite the fact that more women than men are earning college degrees, and that women continue to make the bulk of buying decisions, corporate America has been slow to reflect that in its leadership ranks. …

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