It is too early to write off Mr. Medvedev, who recently turned 47. He is now prime minister and remains the leader of the governing United Russia party and the second-most-important politician in the country. A year ago he demonstrated his loyalty to Mr. Putin by walking away from a second term, and Mr. Putin […]
When most people think of Indonesia today, they think of beaches and temples or of its famously teeming cities, but this country of 240 million and counting is a much more modern, diversified, and dynamic economy than many international investors and companies assume. To make the most of Indonesia’s vast potential, they’re going to need […]
When the Japanese army invaded China in 1931, Mao Zedong, in those days still a guerrilla fighter, turned and ran. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s nominal president at the time, stayed behind to fight the Japanese in his wartime capital of Chongqing, but Mao’s Communist Party fled to the north to establish a base of anti-Japanese resistance in […]
India has taken two important decisions for stepping up its defense cooperation with the Maldives, a country situated in the Indian Ocean. This is significant when considering China’s recently-enlarged strategic footprint in the area. To begin with, the Indian government has decided to station a Defense Attaché at Male, the capital of Maldives. Additionally, India has […]
FOR A Communist leadership that prides itself on bringing political and economic stability to its 90m subjects, the past few weeks in Vietnam must have seemed like a nightmare. There have been more bank runs, executives on the lam, arrests and credit panics than the country has seen in years. So febrile is the atmosphere […]
In his new book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, Robert Kaplan (Stratfor Global Intelligence) contends that current global conflicts, including wars, political instability, and clashes over religion, can be better understood and even forecasted through close examination of the maps that chart our world. Read […]
ANYBODY who has played (or watched their children play) life-simulation computer games, such as “SimCity” or “The Sims”, will know how engrossing they can be. Countless hours are spent creating an intricate synthetic world, be it a house or a whole city, inventing characters that speak a nonsense tongue known as Simlish, controlling their actions […]
During the Cold War, two blocs of nations stood ranged against one another in an easily comprehended conflict between two economic and political systems. In our age, the fault-lines are not so easily detected. Warfare is frequently asymmetric. The proximate causes of battle are often hyper-local, tribal and sectarian. The threads that link one to […]
This summer, many government officials and private investors finally seemed to realize that the crisis in the euro zone was not some passing aberration, but rather a result of deep-seated political, economic, and financial problems that will take many years to resolve. The on-again, off-again euro turmoil has already proved immensely damaging to nearly all Europeans, […]
If the age of men has ended, nobody told Asia. True, across the continent women are obtaining degrees at higher rates — in some cases outpacing men — and bucking traditional gender roles. Yet the past few decades have brought significant setbacks as well as breakthroughs. Men’s wages are now growing faster than women’s wages […]
