The arrival of Hamid Karzai, on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2001, promised Afghans a break from the recent bloody past. Karzai’s lack of involvement in the long, brutal civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989 raised the possibility of a unified country after a decade of battling fiefs. Read Here […]
There is none of the passion, none of the moral sense that inspired foreign policy in the time of former British premier Margaret Thatcher and former US president Ronald Reagan. Read Here – Gulf News
The European elections have shown how big a problem populism really is. But Cameron, Hollande and other leaders can keep the populists at bay if they start to look south. Read Here – The European
It’s true that economic growth through industrialization altered the social structure of societies and created demand for political representation. But it’s now clear that the process has also led to the opposite of liberal democracy. Read Here – Bloomberg
Iraq joined Syria in civil war and Ukraine’s crisis persisted this week. And yet let me argue that this week’s most important geopolitical news is the economic program of India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi. Any increase in the chances for a full-scale supply-side transformation of India’s economy is reason to cheer for many reasons. First and […]
The question that everybody now is asking is this: Why this new development in China-Russia relations? Obviously, the main trigger is the recent Ukraine crisis that has seriously damaged Russia-West relations, thereby pushing Russia closer to China. However, there is also a larger strategic reason. That is, there are mutual strategic needs as both China and Russia […]
The roots of the current violence go at least as far back as Iraq’s 2006-2007 civil war, which didn’t so much end as get put on hiatus. The spate of sectarian violence pitted the Shiite-majority government against Sunni militias and al-Qaeda in Iraq (a group from which ISIS emerged). The U.S. troop “surge” halted the […]
The United States is addicted to oil and China’s got a serious coal problem, Simran Khosla writes in Global Post. Read Here
In China, three demographics increasingly stand out: Unmarried young workers, couples who have delayed or foregone childbirth, and elderly empty-nesters. 160 million Chinese households, or 40 percent of the nationwide total, now consist only of one or two people. Read Here – TeaLeafNation
The Islamic Republic’s political class knows its hold on power depends on sustained economic growth, and that in turn requires a resolution of the nuclear issue. But the men who rule Iran still want the leverage of nuclear power. Read Here – cfr.org
looking beyond borders 