Hezbollah’s launching of a pilotless spy plane, which was shot down by Israel’s air force in the southern part of the country in early October, has been seen as more evidence that the Lebanese militia is preparing for war. Israelis assume that the drone was gathering visual intelligence to help Hezbollah in its goal of bombarding distant targets with long-range […]
The 2012 farming season may be in its waning days, but the consequences of this year’s drought, the worst of its kind in 25 years, are yet to be known. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the drought will push retail food prices up by between 3% and 4% in 2013. That’s a higher-than-average […]
Throughout the U.S. presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic political operatives have strived to articulate major foreign-policy distinctions between President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Several close foreign-policy watchers, however, have struggled to identify any such differences. The final presidential debate on Oct. 22 finally cemented what has been apparent to many over the course of the campaign: […]
As the networked world of the internet makes that which is distant seem very local, reality can be both distorted and amplified. The unfortunate “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt by many toward American support of Arab nations. Yet this would not have occurred without the ability to spread […]
The emir of of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, has called for unity between Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah. Sheikh Hamad also denounced Israel’s policies and praised people of the Gaza Strip for standing up to it with “bare chests” during a one-day visit to the coastal enclave ruled by Hamas. The visit was the first by a head of state since Gaza fell under […]
China shuffled three senior military officials amid political horse-trading at the highest echelons of the Communist Party before a once-a-decade leadership transition next month. General Ma Xiaotian, the army’s deputy chief of staff, was named to lead China’s air force, while Zhu Fuxi, former director of the air force’s political department, replaces Tian Xiusi as political […]
AFTER giving a speech at a business conference in London a young analyst chatted with investment executives in the audience, then followed two of them to a nearby hotel lobby. Over glasses of Chablis the executives raved about their company’s worldwide network of extravagantly decorated offices and their fat annual bonuses. Then they offered the […]
When Israel was bombing Beirut during the war of 2006, a colleague and I sat drinking a beer after a long, hard day, listening to the explosions coming every few minutes from the southern suburbs. “Is this what it felt like to be somewhere in central Europe in the 1930s?” he mused. Comparisons are never exact, […]
In the last half century, East Asia emerged as the uber-performer on the global economic stage. The various countries in the region found success with substantially different systems: state-led capitalism in South Korea, Singapore and Japan; wild and wooly competitive, entrepreneur-led growth in Taiwan and Hong Kong; and more recently, what Deng Xiaoping once described as […]
Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries, known as the BRICs: Brazil, […]
