Areas of PDC activity, including academic study, professional practice and advocacy
By Dr. Sherry Lee Mueller, PDC President This July 4th requires a reckoning of who we are and our place in the world. This first July 4 after the tragedy of January 6 must be about more than spectacular fireworks, tantalizing tastes, and backyard BBQs. Almost a century ago in 1922, Elihu Root, who served…
By Alan Heil Today’s news that the United States and NATO allies have departed the Bagram Air Base, the largest military installation in Afghanistan, calls for reflection. Twenty years ago, U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan. That was just a couple of weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan killed 2,977 Americans in the infamous September 11 attacks…
by Alan Heil You might call it Earth’s most mysterious and least explored region on our planet, for good reasons: *Antarctica is the world’s fifth-largest and most frigid continent, covering about 20 % of the southern hemisphere. It’s unique in other aspects: —The only continent with no permanent human settlements and lacking a native indigenous…
by Alan Heil There’s a seemingly endless crisis in that embattled strategically important South Asian country of nearly forty million people. What should the world be watching for in the critical summer of 2021? The latest turn of events As the Washington Post reports from Kabul on June 23: “A sweeping Taliban offensive across northern…
1. U.S. IMAGE REBOUNDS DUE TO “THE BIDEN EFFECT”: Many Americans — and most foreigners — feel that four years of the Trump presidency did considerable damage to the country’s reputation around the world. Since June 10, 2021, they have some solid, independent research to support that conclusion. A Pew Research Center survey of 16 publics…
1. POTUS AND CODELS — THEY’RE BACK!: Both President (POTUS) Biden and Vice President Harris have taken their first foreign trips since assuming office to demonstrate that the United States is once again showing leadership and consulting with its friends. The President’s destination was Europe for the G7 summit in the UK, the NATO and U.S.-EU summit…
A wide angle Agence France Presse photo of President Biden, on his first overseas trip as chief executive, displays a crowd sitting behind him. Of a hundred spectators in the stands, all except two are wearing black masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The President was speaking to U.S. Air Force staff in Suffolk,…
by Alan Heil Graduate addresses can blend together as compositions rendered in a fine orchestra. To quote Amelia Nierenberg in the New York Times: “Graduation is really a victory.” Or, as basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told graduates at Washington University in St. Louis: “Surviving means that you have come through the catastrophe, but you’re still…
by Alan Heil When I led VOA during a couple of years in the mid-1990s, we debated what might lie ahead on for the world and the U.S. as we deployed more than a score of correspondents around a post-Cold War planet. Who then, or for more than two decades since, could have foreseen the…
1. THE PRESIDENT’S 2022 “WISH LIST” AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: President Biden has submitted his FY 2022 budget to Congress, and it requests a historic, mind-numbing $6 trillion to “help us build back better, leaving us stronger at home and on the world stage.” This request includes $58.5 billion for State Department and USAID, a 10 percent…