The New Yorker

My Interview: 
Obama on War and Peace 
By Robin Wright

President Obama was in a reflective mood when he met with a small group of journalists at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, a few hours after he delivered a combative speech defending the Iran deal. He is, in private meetings, a congenial stoic, even as he chews Nicorette gum to stay ahead of an old vice. But Obama's frustration—that the bigger message of his foreign policy is being lost in the political furies over Iran—was conspicuous. He made clear that the proposed deal, the most ambitious foreign-policy initiative of his Presidency, is less about Iran than about getting America off its war track; Obama believes that Washington, almost by default, too often unwisely deploys the military as the quickest solution to international crises.

Obama makes many of his pitches in the Roosevelt Room, a modest, windowless chamber with a conference table. When the West Wing was built, in 1902, it was originally the President’s office. A portrait of Franklin Roosevelt is on one wall; a picture of Teddy Roosevelt, as a Rough Rider on horseback, hangs over the fireplace. The most striking piece in the room is the smallest: The 1906 Nobel Prize, the first won by an American and the first by a U.S. President, is encased behind glass. It went to Teddy Roosevelt for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese war. Only two other Presidents–Woodrow Wilson, for the League of Nations, and Jimmy Carter, after leaving office, for promoting human rights—had won it before Obama was named, just months after his election, more for his spirit than any specific achievement. As he enters the final eighteen months of his Presidency, he seems to want to prove that he deserves it.

Obama chose to give the Iran speech on the American University campus, where John F. Kennedy told the 1963 graduating class, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression.”

Obama echoed a similar message....Read on.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/obama-on-war-and-peace

The New Yorker

Obama's Hard Sell on Iran
By Robin Wright

With the most important foreign-policy initiative of his Presidency at stake, President Obama has gone on the offensive to salvage his controversial Iran nuclear deal, amid a blitz of television ads and opposition, both at home and abroad. On Wednesday, Obama chose American University—the campus where John F. Kennedy outlined his vision for peace, in 1963, during the early age of nuclear threats—to make his strongest pitch to date. He framed the deal as the latest step in a half century of American policy to avert nuclear confrontation, invoking Kennedy’s diplomacy during the Cuban missile crisis and the arms negotiations with the Soviet Union launched by Ronald Reagan. Under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, he said, the historic Non-Proliferation Treaty and the SALT and START treaties introduced arms control.

“The world avoided nuclear catastrophe, and we created the time and the space to win the Cold War without firing a shot at the Soviets,” he said. The deal with Iran, reached after twenty months of negotiations, “builds on this tradition of strong, principled policy diplomacy.” 

After the speech, in an afternoon session with ten journalists, Obama acknowledged that the vote could be close. “Everything in this Congress squeaks by,” he said. “If I presented a cure for cancer, getting legislation passed to move that forward would be a nail-biter.” Read on: 

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/obamas-hard-sell-on-iran?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Who Would Kill a Giraffe?

Several years ago, I arranged for Neil Armstrong and his wife, Carol, to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Zoo. We stopped first to commune with Jana, the newborn giraffe. The zoo showed us a video of her being born. Giraffes give birth standing up, and Jana dropped some six feet to the ground as she slipped from her mother’s womb. The mother licked her calf, and in minutes the newborn got up on wobbly legs. Neil Armstrong was enthralled. You’d think he’d never seen anything interesting before.

Whatever the conservation merits, I’ve always hated to think of any animal confined behind the bars or walls of zoos, the equivalent of jail cells for animals. It seems particularly unfair for the world’s tallest creatures, the gentle vegetarians with flirty lashes and cinnamon spots. I lived in Africa for seven years, and few sights were as magnificent, or calming, as a herd of giraffes loping gracefully across the savannah. Giraffes seem the most harmless of beasts.

But giraffes are increasingly vulnerable in the wild. The world’s giraffe population has plummeted, by more than forty per cent, over the past fifteen years. “It’s a silent extinction,” Julian Fennessy, the executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, told me this week. “Already, giraffes have become extinct in more than seven African countries. Unfortunately, it’s not fully hit the attention of the world, including many governments and major conservation organizations.” Read on ...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/who-would-kill-a-giraffe?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Cecil the Lion & Robert Mugabe
By Robin Wright
    I interviewed Robert Mugabe the day after he was elected in 1980. He's now the world's oldest leader--and maybe the oldest hypocrite. He feasted on baby elephant at his 91st birthday in February. Zimbabwe only demands justice for foreign poachers, not its own. Read on...
 http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cecil-the-lion-and-robert-mugabe