Early in his first term, Obama wasn’t especially warm towards India. However, he soon visited India, hosted Manmohan Singh as the first foreign leader at the White House, and advocated a permanent seat for India on the United Nations Security Council. Obama has since tried to rope India, along with Japan, into a hedge against […]
One day before announcing Wednesday, Nov. 21’s cease-fire agreement, at a brief news conference prior to talks between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, late on Tuesday night, the secretary announced that her itinerary included Ramallah and Cairo in addition to Jerusalem. The visit to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was […]
For all the talk of tax increases and debt-cutting, President Barack Obama’s biggest and most- revealing decision this year may be which candidate he chooses to be his new secretary of state. It will tell us whether the president allows comfort to trump qualification. The two candidates are Susan Rice, the U.S. envoy to the United […]
In a few quick decisions, President Vladimir Putin has devastated Russia’s energy policy. This daring radical change of strategy will primarily hit state revenues. The essence of these policy changes is renationalization, a massive increase in capital expenditure and reduced efficiency. For years,Gazprom has carried out too large capital expenditures, 70 percent of which investment analysts euphemistically with call “value detraction,” which really means corruption or […]
Kasab, the world came to call him, “the butcher”: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. For millions of Indians, the man caught on closed circuit television cameras as he walked […]
This month, a curious thing happened in the annals of diplomacy. A country offered up a peace plan to put an end to a seemingly endless civil war in Syria. This country was not one of the usual foreign policy suspects — it was not the United States, it was not in Europe, and it wasn’t Syria’s […]
China, Japan and South Korea started talks on a free-trade agreement vital to an Asia-wide deal in a move to forge closer economic ties even as they spar over disputed islands. The countries, representing three of Asia’s four biggest economies, will hold the first round of talks early next year, according to Xinhua, China’s official […]
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable: the sight of a U.S. president standing next to Aung San Suu Kyi, the woman many believe should be — and might yet become — the president of her long-suffering country, Myanmar (also known as Burma). When Barack Obama was first elected to the White House […]
Japan warned on Monday that a row over the SouthChina Sea could damage “peace and stability” in Asia as China stalled on a plan to ease tensions and disagreements flared between the Philippines and Cambodia over the dispute. The acrimony provided an uneasy backdrop to U.S. President Barack Obama‘s arrival in Cambodia for a regional summit […]
On a blustery recent Saturday morning on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, as planes roared overhead on approach to the nearby international airport, three dozen people sat in a tiny classroom at the Royal Academy of Cambodia. Crammed shoulder to shoulder, they watched raptly as a flat-panel TV showed a pair of Chinese pop stars […]
looking beyond borders 