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December 2019

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America First: The American Foreign Policy Shift to Middle East Neo-Isolationism

April 07, 2022 06:14 PM
President Trump ran his 2016 campaign on the slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First.” While the Trump administration’s actions have not always lived up to their stated ideals, the underlying message has resonated with both parties’ respective bases. Sen. Bernie Sanders has frequently called for an end to the American wars in the Middle East, such as American involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has gained a sizeable following by placing foreign non-interventionism at the forefront of her presidential campaign. Trump’s foreign policy message is therefore far from iconoclastic; to the contrary, it is the new foreign policy consensus on “Main Street”, even if it has not yet supplanted the general consensus in Congress and the mainstream media. What explains this inversion in foreign policy preferences? A brief review of key events since World War II is instructive.
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Beyond the Success Sequence: How Marriage can be an Economic Advantage for American Families

April 07, 2022 06:13 PM
Get married before you have kids, have a job, and graduate high school. These are the three components of what social scientists call “The Success Sequence”. Research shows that if you do these three things, your chances of finding yourself in poverty are below 3%. Sounds simple enough, right? Some say not so fast.
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Adding Fuel to the Fire: Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Intervene in Venezuela

April 07, 2022 06:12 PM
Venezuela’s economic and political situation is dire. Government mismanagement and a collapse of oil export revenues in 2014 created a devastating economic crisis, causing a sixty-six percent drop in GDP and a mass exodus of over ten percent of the population [1]. Food, water, and power shortages are frequent, with the price of many groceries skyrocketing by several thousand percent in the last year alone [2]. The country also faces political strain; Nicolás Maduro, the incumbent president of Venezuela, held an illegitimate election last year, which prompted the National Assembly to declare a constitutional crisis and appoint Juan Guaidó as temporary president [3]. The power struggle still hasn’t been resolved, with both Guaidó and Maduro claiming the title of president. However, despite the continuing severity of the situation, the United States should resist the urge to intervene on Venezuela’s behalf.
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The Myth of Dangerous Nuclear Energy

April 07, 2022 06:11 PM
Between 1970 and 2009, there were several nuclear accidents or disasters resulting in approximately 5,000 deaths worldwide [1]. Many of these deaths were the result of cancers caused by radiation exposure. The photos and stories of resultant deformity and illness are painful. These victims are owed recognition and respect. Unrecognized, however, are the estimated 1.8 million people whose lives have been saved due to the production of nuclear energy [1]. While unnoticed, these individuals live all around the globe. It is very possible that one of these people is someone you know—a person who would have died as a result of increased air pollutants in the absence of nuclear power. If society is serious about providing a safe, reliable energy source to combat climate change, nuclear energy must be part of the solution.
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Virtue Signaling and False Victimhood: How to Kill Dialogue

April 07, 2022 06:09 PM
Dialogue in America is dying. Don’t believe me? Turn on your TV, phone, laptop, ask Alexa, etc. You’ll find an unhealthy amount of partisan vitriol, as both sides of the spectrum vigorously snap at each other’s necks. Unfortunately, this trenchant jawing is spreading beyond the talking heads crowding the national discussion. Noxious exchanges happen every day among local leaders, administrators, teachers, and even family members. For example. while you spend time with both extended and intimate family members over the holidays, see what happens when you bring up the following subjects: the ongoing impeachment inquiry, 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates, the NFL’s recent workout for Colin Kaepernick, and the disparate crowd receptions to Trump’s appearance at game six of the World Series and Alabama-LSU game this past month.
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Humanity in Crisis

April 07, 2022 06:07 PM
As of 2018, there are nearly seventy-five million refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons (I.D.P.s), returned refugees, returned I.D.P.s, and stateless persons. Anyone falling into one of these categories is classified by the United Nations as a “person of concern” [1]. To put this into perspective, the number of persons of concern worldwide could simultaneously fill every N.F.L. stadium thirty-four times over. In the last fifteen years, the number of refugees alone has more than doubled, reaching over twenty-five million refugees throughout the world. While each of these categories vary in technical differences, there is one commonality between all of them: they are human beings without a safe home. The refugee crisis cannot be limited to their regions of origin, as this issue spans across national borders.
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Chile: A Four Cent Tip of the Iceberg

April 07, 2022 06:07 PM
Protests are dominating headlines as of late. While it may seem easy to paint with broad brush strokes, the root discontent for each of these protests remain different. Chilean protests are unlike those in Hong Kong in that the Chileans are sick of over thirty years of broken promises and an economic “miracle” that was only miraculous for an elite few.
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Is the Sun Setting on Japan’s Pacifism?

April 07, 2022 06:06 PM
Although modern Japan consists of four main islands, plus the tropical outpost of Okinawa, the Japanese once controlled Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria (northeastern China), and parts of mainland China. Imperialist Japan ultimately saw its downfall after defeat in World War II, and a seven-year American occupation followed. Perhaps the longest-lasting and most influential result of the occupation was the installment of an American-authored democratic Constitution. Included was Article 9, denouncing war and prohibiting the Japanese from maintaining a standing army. However, emerging security challenges and President Trump’s recent comments about the U.S. military relationship with Japan are prompting discussion to alter Article 9 to legitimize the Japanese Self Defense Forces and make a bolder statement on Japanese military intentions.
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Provo and Plastic Waste

April 07, 2022 05:58 PM
Utah--with all kinds of natural beauty to celebrate--needs to step it up on their plastic waste policies. Park City and Moab have already taken the lead, so why haven’t Provo, Salt Lake, and other more metropolitan areas taken any sort of responsibility?
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We Should Care About the Kurds

April 07, 2022 05:54 PM
The Kurds occupy an interesting space in global affairs. Both ideologically and structurally, they differ greatly from their friends and enemies. Structurally speaking, they’re one of the world’s largest stateless nations, residing in Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia, but they’re not particularly welcome in any place they occupy. The easiest way to sum up the last 100 years of Kurdish statelessness is to say that the Kurds have always had a bad time. Under Ottoman rule they were oppressed, and after WWI, they were promised a state of their own. The new Turkish state, however, refused to give the Kurds the rights or the land necessary to establish their promised autonomous state. As a result, the Kurds have always had, to put it nicely, a difficult relationship with the Turkish government. Kurds in Turkey and Iraq are members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which serves as the military and political institution of the nation. Since 2015, the PKK and associated insurgent groups like the People’s Protection Units (YPG) have been in direct conflict with Turkey, initially accusing Turkey of allowing Islamic State soldiers to cross its border and attack Kurdish cities. As the United States strives to maintain amicable relationships with its fellow NATO member Turkey, it doesn’t seem to make sense that there would be any sort of relationship between the United States and Kurdish forces. So, why does a stateless, radical ethnic group that the Turkish and Syrian governments deem terrorists have such an important, albeit rocky, relationship with the United States?
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