Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines are trying to determine who are the top public intellectuals in the world. And they want your help in the process. Describing the contest they say:

"They are some of the world’s most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights. In the second Foreign Policy/Prospect list of top public intellectuals, we reveal the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time."

Here they have listed and described the 100 finalists. The names include prominent parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, such as Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan, Thomas Friedman, David Petraeus, Francis Fukuyama, Samantha Power, Fareed Zakaria, and more.

The site offers readers the chance to vote for their five favorites. I chose Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi of Iran, Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power of the United States, The Post-American World author Fareed Zakaria of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus of Bangladesh, and economist Jeffrey Sachs of the United States.

Voting ends on May 15.

A new report, poll, map, book club discussion, and more are among the very good things I have found across the Web in recent days. Check them out:

Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index
Every six months, Public Agenda releases poll results on American views of foreign policy. Economy and energy are the new top two concerns. And 84 percent are worried about how things are going for the United States in world affairs.

New Report on Terrorism
The U.S. State Department just released its annual country-by-country report on terrorist threats and activities.

A Diplomat's View on Engaging Iran
Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering has held several unofficial meetings with Iranians over the years. Late last month, Pickering spoke with NPR's Scott Simon where he speculated on how official U.S.-Iranian talks could happen.

TPM Book Club: Heads in the Sand
Experts at the TPM Book Club are discussing the new book by Matthew Yglesias, "Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats"

The World According to the Editors
Foreign Policy Passport found these maps where the countries are sized according to the number of headlines they generate in select media outlets.

Facts About NAFTA
About Guide to US Economy Kimberly Amadeo has collected a number of great resources on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Best Foreign Policy Blogs
The blogosphere is full of great resources on U.S. foreign policy. Some of it is analysis, some is opinion, and some is on-the-ground reporting. Here are the ones I check nearly every day.

As we hurtle closer to November 4, 2008, I am ready to start speculating about who will succeed Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. I've created a list of potential nominees for each of the remaining presidential candidates. And yes, there is some overlap in the lists. A President Barack Obama might need to reach out to a Clinton adviser. And there are a handful of foreign policy gurus which could cross party lines and serve either a Democrat or a President John McCain.

So what do you think? Review the names and make your prediction here.

From the Council on Foreign Relations to Congress and from the Brookings Institution to the United Nations, there are a number of institutions important to the creation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy.

• American Enterprise Institute
• Brookings Institution
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Center for American Progress
• Citizens Groups
• Congress
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Defense Department
• Executive Branch
• Heritage Foundation
• NATO
• RAND Corporation
• State and Local Governments
• State Department
• Think Tanks and NGOs
• United Nations
• United Nations Security Council

During the Cold War, the global situation was described as "bipolar." Almost all nations aligned themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union. There was a "non-aligned movement" led by India. But even their name reinforced the reality that there were only two real powers in the world.

After the USSR collapsed, international affairs experts began talking about a "unipolar" world. This was a rare moment when one country, in this case the United States, strode the world as an unchallenged power. But the unipolar moment did not last long.

Other countries and groups of countries challenge the United States on a range of issues and sometimes get their way. The European Union offers the Euro as a serious alternative to the U.S. dollar for global investment. China flexes its trade muscle with American allies in the developing world. The Middle East controls much of the U.S. energy supply, and so on. No one country can counter the United States across the board, but the slow aggregation of these challenges led foreign policy wonks to begin talking about a "multipolar" world.

In fact, "multipolar" has been a buzz world in policy circles just long enough that it is about time for someone to offer up a new word and a new way of describing the current world. To do so, along comes Richard Haass.

Ambassador Haass is former Bush Administration official and author who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations. In a new article for Foreign Affairs and in a column for the Financial Times, Haas describes a world of "nonpolarity."

Haass acknowledges the rise of some other big powers (like China, the European Union, India, Japan, and Russia), but he adds:

"Today's world differs in a fundamental way from one of classic multipolarity: there are many more power centers, and quite a few of these poles are not nation-states. Indeed, one of the cardinal features of the contemporary international system is that nation-states have lost their monopoly on power and in some domains their preeminence as well. States are being challenged from above, by regional and global organizations; from below, by militias; and from the side, by a variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and corporations. Power is now found in many hands and in many places."

Haas says this new world offers many challenges and dangers for the United States. But I am glad he also focuses on changes we can make now to reap the benefits a nonpolar world offers.

• The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow U.S. Dominance from Foreign Affairs
• What Follows American Dominion? from Financial Times
• After the Unipolar Moment: Reconciling the U.S. and the World, from the Stanley Foundation
• The New Consensus — A Multipolar World, from the International Herald Tribune

One of the best parts of being an About.com guide is knowing that across the network, other guides are digging up great resources and analysis on my topic. Here are three recent examples of great guide content on U.S. foreign policy:

• Should Jimmy Carter Meet With Hamas? asks About Guide to Middle East Issues Pierre Tristam
• Bush on Global Warming: Decider or Dissembler? asks About Guide to Environmental Issues Larry West
• If the Dollar Collapses Will Americans Emigrate en Masse? asks About Guide to U.S. Economy Kimberly Amadeo
• Speaker Pelosi Was Right to Block Colombia Free Trade Pact says About Guide to U.S. Liberal Politics Deborah White
• Don Eberly and the Case for a Global Civil Society from About Guide to U.S. Conservative Politics Justin Quinn

From Madeleine Albright to Zalmay Khalilzad, all kinds of interesting people inside the United States and out have an impact on U.S. foreign policy. The list includes ambassadors, secretaries of state, special envoys, senators, and other top brass and big wigs.

Here are my profiles of Albright, Khalilzad, James Baker, Ban Ki Moon, Henry Kissinger, David Petraeus, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and many more.

The blogosphere is full of great resources on U.S. foreign policy. Some of it is analysis, some is opinion, and some is on-the-ground reporting. Here are the ones I check nearly every day:

• Foreign Policy Passport. This blog is run by the editors of Foreign Policy magazine. The daily "Morning Briefing" full of foreign policy related links is priceless.
• The Washington Note. Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation runs this personal blog. Mixed in with great analysis of current events is high-quality, well-informed speculation about behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Washington, DC's foreign policy machine. And it has a new design!

See the full list.

This week marks the 59th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO is often described as the largest and most successful military alliance the world has ever seen. The United States, Canada, Turkey, Greece, and most of Western Europe are members. More recently, a number of eastern European countries have joined bringing total membership to 26.

The defining feature of NATO is its common security arrangement. This means all members pledge to treat an attack on one of them as an attack on all of them, a promise referred to as the "Article 5" agreement.

When the treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, the alliance was seen as a way to curb the expansion of the Soviet Union. By 1955, the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of Soviet-dominated states, was formed. Competition between the two alliances was the defining theme of the Cold War.

NATO provided a strong framework for western military cooperation throughout the Cold War. Yet when the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, NATO's war-fighting capability had never been used. And the "Article 5" pledge had never been called into action. Then in 1994, NATO took military action to end fighting in Bosnia and again in 1999 in Kosovo. The day after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, NATO unanimously voted to invoke the "Article 5" provisions, and NATO now runs allied military operations in Afghanistan.

It is exactly this work in Afghanistan which experts fear could tear NATO apart. Here are a couple of recent blog posts which indicate the Afghan situation must be addressed if NATO is to have many more birthdays:

The Transatlantic Alliance's Afghan Strains
"For some time now, transatlantic analysts have warned that the NATO deployment of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and US troops in Afghanistan is on the precipice of unraveling, and with that will usher in grave questions and implications for the future of NATO and transatlantic ties. Given Zbigniew Brzezinski's pronouncement in his book Second Chance that the drift in transatlantic ties throughout the 1990s was one of two crucial meta-mistakes that undermined the US position globally, there is real cause for concern here," writes Sameer Lalwani in The Washington Note.

The Burden of Leadership: Afghanistan's NATO Problem and US Responsibility
I've been paying close attention to the uneasy back and forth between NATO member states and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lately. Gates, facing reports of looming state failure in Afghanistan, Gates, who is a much less high-strung SecDef than his predecessor Don Rumsfeld, has pointed to the openly-waffling members of the NATO alliance and said, 'Where you at?' The problem is, Gates is paying for the mistakes of the past, both by Rumsfeld and by the Bush White House writ large since routing the Taliban in Afghanistan years ago," writes Tarek Rizk in The Exchange.

On Wednesday March 26, Senator John McCain delivered a sweeping speech on U.S. foreign policy in front of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. The speech is well worth reading and noteworthy for several reasons:

The American Role
McCain acknowledges that the days of American dominance over world affairs are past; other countries are gaining significant power. He says the United States must remain politically, economically, and militarily strong. "But we must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish," he said.

The War Experience
McCain discusses his personal experience with war from the day his father was swept away into World War II to his own days in Vietnam. "I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description," he said. And this blunts one the main charges used against McCain, namely that he is the candidate of "war without end" including another hundred years in Iraq.

Belief in Internationalism
McCain expresses belief in "international good citizenship." He calls for a new Kyoto Treaty, a new partnership among the countries of North and South America, a strong NATO, reorganization of the G-8, and a new Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. He calls for creating, "...a global coalition for peace and freedom - if we lead by shouldering our international responsibilities and pointing the way to a better and safer future for humanity, I believe we will gain tangible benefits as a nation."

Tough on Allies
McCain says the United States has supported "autocrats" for too long, and we need to start supporting democracies. He wants America to rely less on "...the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family." He would like to exclude Russia from G-8 and add in Brazil and India.

Difference From Bush Administration
The difference in both tone and substance from the Bush Administration is striking. No president, Republican or Democratic, has ever reframed America's role in the world quite this way. Unlike President Bush, John McCain seems not to think "treaty" is a dirty word. And conservatives have long been loathe to imply that U.S. action in the world is in any way limited by the wishes or advice of other countries.

Conservative Split Highlighted
The GOPUSA blog offered a stinging critique of the speech, "What McCain is saying is that American interests are now up for veto by the collective 'world body' and we must always get permission before action is taken." The blog goes on to say that McCain's views are neither conservative nor Republican. Conservative columnist David Brooks, on the other hand, wrote highly of the speech in his New York Times column, saying McCain "...signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years."

Could a Democrat Have Said This?
As I read the speech I saw much that I agree with and much that I think U.S. foreign policy experts of all political stripes would applaud. But my other thought was, how big would the outcry be from conservative media if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton gave the same speech?