Foreign Policy

In attempts to 1) be responsive to Beyond Labels participants who prefer to know each week’s topic so they can come prepared and 2) motivate Court Haight to join us tomorrow, we chose “Russia” as the topic of the week.

Sorry about the short notice! And see you tomorrow.

For next week, we plan to turn our attention to Europe to consider the questions raised in the following New York Times article: The Questions That Could Reshape a Worried Europe in 2017.

Although there are lots of questions, we felt that it might be best to come prepared to discuss all of them–based on the premise that some might not be fruitful enough for two hours’ discussion and we might thereby suffer from more “topic drift.”

See you next week!

If tomorrow’s winter storm doesn’t get you thinking about warmer climes, perhaps this will…

We’ll discuss the Obama Administration’s steps toward normalization of relations with Cuba.

• Is now the time to normalize relations?
• Should there be any preconditions?
• How rapidly should it take place?
• What happened to the principles governing our policy for the last 50+ years? What changed?
• To what degree should the views of Cuban emigres to the US help to shape our national policy vis-a-vis Cuba?
• What similarities/differences are there from the Nixon Administration’s steps to normalize relations with China?

See you tomorrow.