In October 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to inform him that peace was at hand between Israel and Syria. Two weeks later, Rabin was dead, killed by a reactionary Jewish Israeli fanatic; the peace agreement that Rabin referenced died not long thereafter. But Israeli hopes for an eventual agreement […]
The bulls are running on Wall Street, but the chief of America’s central bank worries that the market remains dangerously fragile. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained why on Friday, May 10, in a speech in Chicago at the Fed’s branch there. Here are five things that nag at Bernanke, in his own words. Read Here – Businessweek
Whichever party takes power in Islamabad will almost certainly have to cobble together a coalition to rule. The new government will inherit a looming foreign-exchange crisis, hours-long blackouts that have provoked street riots, and overlapping insurgencies and sectarian wars that have claimed thousands of lives. Though army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has resisted the temptation to […]
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During her ultimately victorious presidential campaign last year, South Korea’s new conservative president, Park Geun Hye, rarely touched on foreign policy. (Though it’s a fair question as to whether North Korea really constitutes “foreign” policy as far as Seoul is concerned.) When I traveled with Park as she campaigned across […]
INDIA will soon have a fifth of the world’s working-age population. But many are worried that it is squandering its opportunity. During the boom of the 1990s and 2000s it became fashionable to talk of India’s demographic dividend – evoking the experiences of East Asia. There, working-age populations rose at the same time as the […]
One hopes China has genuinely reconsidered picking a fight with India, a great power with which it shares a long land frontier. Beijing has created headaches aplenty for itself through its conduct in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The last thing it should do is open another axis along which to disperse energy […]
Brazil, one of the world’s largest emerging markets, achieved a major diplomatic victory with the election this week of its candidate, Roberto Azevedo, as director-general of the World Trade Organization. In this heavily disputed election, involving 159 member countries, Brazil cashed in on a long campaign, cultivating support among the developing countries of Africa, Asia, […]
China and India need to work harder to avoid flare-ups along their disputed border and resolve those that do happen more quickly, India’s top diplomat said Friday. On the second day of a visit to Beijing, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid praised the relatively smooth resolution of a three-week standoff between border troops from either […]
If Pakistan‘s May 11 parliamentary elections unfold according to recent national opinion surveys, two-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif will once again take power in Islamabad. Deposed in a 1999 coup led by General Pervez Musharraf, Sharif fled for nearly a decade of Saudi-sponsored exile. Today, however, it is Musharraf who lives under house arrest just outside Islamabad […]
Even if most Saudis recognised the significant progress recorded under the leadership of King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, few appreciated the epochal reform decisions that provided and ensured a high standard of living, which also transformed and continue to change Saudi Arabia into the key Arab pivot in world affairs. For eight continuous years after […]
