Mark Falcoff

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mark Falcoff is an American scholar and policy consultant who has worked with a number of important think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hoover Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Falcoff earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Missouri in 1963, and would later earn a Ph.D. and M.A. at Princeton University. He served as a consultant and staff member on a number of important committees and commissions, including the 1983 National Bipartisan Commission on Central America and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He has taught and lectured at several universities.

The focus of Falcoff's work is Latin America and related US policies. He has authored numerous publication on subjects ranging from the causes of the Juan Perón period of Argentine politics to the controversial US handover of the Panama Canal to Panama. Many of his books are published in conjunction with AEI; the latest of these is Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro's Legacy, which attempts to challenge common assumptions pertaining to Cuba-United States relations and the impact on Cuba of Fidel Castro's eventual demise.

Falcoff served on the US delegation to the (former) United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) 2003 convention in Geneva, Switzerland. He was highly critical of the proceedings, as well as the body itself, and spoke before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (chaired by Representatives Frank Rudolph Wolf and Tom Lantos) about his experiences. Falcoff deplored the fact that members such as China, Zimbabwe, and Libya, with their own long-standing human rights problems, have such an important presence on the commission, and the fact that the consideration of human rights in the Palestinian territories is, according to Falcoff, not objective and vastly disproportionate to overall human rights concerns in the world. He accused the commission of waste and incompetence, for allowing countries with questionable human rights issues to "establish their moral superiority (that is, their apparently greater devotion to "economic and social rights"), serving at the same time to deflect attention from their atrocities in the civil and political area." Falcoff suggested that the commission was a disgrace and that the best solution was to leave it entirely. [1]

In a 2003 article for Commentary, Falcoff defended former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who served as the head of the 1983 commission on Central America which Falcoff consulted) against claims, most notably made by polemicist Christopher Hitchens in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, that Kissinger was responsible for the Chilean coup of 1973 and subsequent atrocities committed by the forces of President Augusto Pinochet. [2]

Falcoff's articles have appeared in a number of influential newspapers and academic journals, such as The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. He is currently Resident Scholar Emeritus of AEI.

[edit] Published works

Prologue to Peron: Argentina in Depression and War, 1930-1943, 1976.
The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939: American Hemispheric Perspectives, 1982.
Small Countries, Large Issues, 1984.
The Continuing Crisis: U.S. Policy in Central America and the Caribbean, co-editor Robert Royal, 1987.
Chile: Prospects for Democracy, co-authors Susan K. Purcell, Arturo Valenzuela, 1988.
A Tale of Two Policies: U.S. Relations with the Argentine Junta, 1976-1983, 1989.
Modern Chile: A Critical History, 1989.
Latin America after the Cold War: Implications for U.S. Policy, co-cauthors Douglas Payne, Susan K. Purcell, 1991.
Searching for Panama: The U.S.-Panama Relationship and Democratization, co-author Richard L. Millett, 1993.
A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously, 1998.
Panama's Canal: What Happens When the United States Gives a Small Country What it Wants, 2000. A PDF version is available at AEI's website. [3]
The Cuban Revolution and the United States: A History in Documents, 1958-1960, 2001.
Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro's Legacy, 2003.