Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: How the United States and China Fail the Global Environmental Governance System

Thu, November 14, 2019
Dinner Program
Robert Dry

In the fifty years of the global environmental governance system, UN member states have negotiated and implemented dozens of multilateral environmental agreements (MEA’s) to address critical planetary challenges, from climate change to transportation of hazardous substances to species extinction. Yet, many of these agreements fail to halt the underlying crisis they seek to address. Using case studies, Robert Dry, adjunct professor of international relations at New York University and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC this fall, will demonstrate American and Chinese recalcitrance in meeting obligations in this global system.

Trained as a lawyer, Robert Dry served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in the Middle East, East, and Southeast Asia. He teaches international relations at New York University and is at Claremont McKenna College this fall as a Podlich Distinguished Fellow. His research interests include diplomatic studies (the study of diplomacy as an institution of international society), the Persian Gulf, and U.S. foreign policy in that region, and both public and private international law.

Dry began his career at the U.S. Department of State as the judicial assistance officer (practitioner of private international law) and participated in the claims process against Iran following the 1979 Iranian revolution. He implemented aspects of the then just enacted Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. In his first overseas assignment in the Foreign Service, he was posted in the U.S. Interests Section of the Belgium Embassy in Baghdad to serve as consul during the Iran/Iraq war. Subsequent foreign assignments included including Muscat, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Riyadh, Hanoi, Muscat, and Paris, among other postings including in the U.S.at the State Department.

Dry holds a Master of Arts degree in British legal history and classical Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and a J.D. from George Washington University’s National Law Center. In the Foreign Service, Dry studied economics, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian area studies, and successfully tested in Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese.

 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Robert Dry

 

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