When Bill Clinton went to North Korea to secure the release of hostages, he became the latest "private citizen" to go toe to toe with foreign governments. The Beast presents the highlights and lowlights from two centuries of unofficial diplomacy.
Time to Make Nice with Cuba?
Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire was published last year. She writes a film column for The Guardian Online and is working on a book about the Cold War in the Caribbean.
If Obama embraces his popularity in Cuba and abandons the embargo, the Castros will lose an enemy, the region will embrace us-and it will ruin the place.
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's Chief Investigative Reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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