What are the biggest issues in the world today? Climate change? Iran having the bomb? Terrorism? A global pandemic?
And how does one keep abreast of it all? In our vastly changing media environment, citizens have to be aggressive to keep up, whether that means reading the international section of the Washington Post or the New York Times, or checking out CNN International, the BBC or Al Jazeera America.
Or, if you live in Tampa Bay, attending the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs.
Douglas L. McElhaney certainly thinks it’s important for Americans to know what’s going on in the world, which is why he’s once again organizing the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs (formerly known as St. Petersburg in the World) on the USFSP campus.
McElhaney, a St. Pete resident since 2007, served as a foreign service officer at the U.S. State Department for 34 years. He says that ultimately the goal of the conference is to make local residents more informed about the world they live in, and the choices they make about who governs them.
“It’s always been kind of an anomaly to me that there wasn’t the interest in foreign affairs that there is in other countries,” says McElhaney, sounding like those foreign human rights activists who say that the U.S. presidential election shouldn’t be limited to U.S. citizens.
“The more people can be articulate and informed about these issues, the more they can say to their leaders, ‘Well, wait a minute. Why are we doing this, or why are we doing that?’ And I think as the most powerful country in the world and the one that so many people rely on, that we need to have that in our electorate.”
This year’s conference, running Feb. 13-15 at USFSP, features 16 panel discussions and 31 speakers, both a noticeable increase from the initial conference in 2013, which drew an average of 200 attendees to each of 10 seminars. Speakers pay their own way, and funding comes solely from “mostly small contributions from attendees,” says McElhaney, with USFSP providing the facilities.
Here are four panel discussions that are likely to provoke thought, discussion, and maybe an argument or two.
Did we bail too soon?
“Getting Out of the Mideast and Asserting U.S. Power in Asia,” Fri., Feb. 14, 9 a.m.
Panelist Walter Andrusyszyn, an adjunct professor of international business at the College of Business Administration at USF, worked in the foreign service from 1980-2003, serving in the Balkans along with Eastern and Western Europe. He’s a sharp critic of how the Obama administration has conducted itself in the Middle East, going back to our involvement (or lack thereof) when the Arab Spring movement exploded in Egypt three years ago.
Although acknowledging that it’s easy to comment in retrospect, Andrusyszyn blames the Obama administration for bailing out too early on the regime of long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak. U.S. realpolitik admirers would say he might have been an undemocratic despot, but he was “our” undemocratic despot.
“I think I would have supported Mubarak because I didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood in there. If we had taken that position, we’d still be with 50 percent of the population there — right now we have zero percent of the population with us,” he says.
Another foreign policy issue that bothers Andrusyszyn was how the White House dealt with the information that a rocket carrying poisonous sarin gas exploded in a Damascus suburb last August, the supposed “smoking gun” that gave the U.S. and NATO permission to use military action against President Bashir al-Assad.
At the time it looked like Obama had painted himself into a corner, as he’d said a year earlier that a chemical weapon attack would immediately cross a “red line” and demand a military response. But instead of enlisting the military, he asked Congress to weigh in first. Strong opposition immediately manifested itself on Capitol Hill and among the American people, and it took Russia’s Vladimir Putin to broker a deal that would put Syria’s chemical arsenal under control of international inspectors.
“The issue was not just the American public,” Andrusyszyn says. “There was no stomach for military action in the Obama administration,” which he says raises the question: “Why do you demand an ultimatum with that red-line policy when you know you’re not going to live up to it?”
In an illuminating and lengthy piece in the New Yorker last week, President Obama again downplayed the power and significance of the modern-day Al Qaeda, saying that the analogy employed among his seniors staffers is that “if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” He went on to say that that there is a clear distinction between the reach of the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden “versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
“That’s not reality,” Andrusyszyn asserts. “Al Qaeda is very strong and growing, particularly in North Africa, certainly in parts of the Middle East.”