"Compete" may be too strong a word, but there are at least four countries competing to show regional influence and leadership at this Summit other than the United States. If Brazil wants to show itself as a regional and even global leader, it can't just sit on the sidelines at this Summit and watch things happen. It needs to engage other countries and lead them to decisions and concrete actions. Mexico will be hosting the G20 meeting later this year, it has a key role to play on citizen security and Calderon has made climate change a top issue on his international agenda. Colombia's diplomacy has been praised so far in the Summit preparation, but it still needs to pull off a successful Summit and then transition that into future leadership roles. While Venezuela's regional influence is slowed, in part due to the health of its president, don't count out the leader of ALBA and his oil money yet. Venezuela leads a significant bloc of states that can still play spoiler or agenda setter under the right conditions.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
