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 […]
Over the next decade, the U.S. military will need to undertake the most dramatic shift in its strategy since the introduction of nuclear weapons more than 60 years ago. Just as defense budgets are declining, the price of projecting and sustaining military power is increasing and the range of interests requiring protection is expanding. This […]
Mao Zedong believed that revolutionary fervor could overcome technological backwardness. But when more pragmatic leaders took power in Beijing, they found that China lagged so far behind the West that the country risked permanent second-class status. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, launched China’s rise by reforming the economy and opening the country to the West. With […]
It’s too bad that Mitt Romney didn’t win. If the Republicans had won, we could finally have known for sure that our suspicion of America‘s imminent demise is correct. “Four more years,” translated into the German viewpoint means little more than a “four-year reprieve.” For the über-watchful among us, the signs of the downfall are […]
With the latest public opinion polls showing the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney a dead heat, the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election in the United States is anyone’s guess. What is certain, however, is that main foreign policy challenges facing the next US administration are located within a brief flying time from Abu Dhabi and are of […]
Officials in Tokyo have known for some time that Japan’s regional foreign policy needs to be revamped. The economic crisis has brought Japan’s export giants to their knees and forced the country’s economy to look at different ways of conducting business. Moreover, the nuclear crisis in Fukushima last spring further intensified Japan’s already acute energy […]
The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned […]
After the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where four Americans (including the U.S. ambassador) were killed, the debate about what went wrong has grown into a heated partisan debate. From it, a refrain of sorts has emerged: we should not “politicize” foreign policy. People of the left and of the right preach that talk of the Benghazi […]
As the Communist Party of China prepares for a once-in-a-decade change of leadership at the 18th Party Congress in November, the country’s foreign relations are in worse shape than they were 10 years ago, especially in East Asia but also in terms of heightened strategic rivalry with the United States. How the incoming leadership chooses […]
Chen Shin-chi smiles through his dentures and drops down to the dusty floor of a jail cell to do a push up. He looks up at the crowd watching him, smiles again, and flips on his back to perform sit-ups, his body stretching almost the entire length of the three-by-two-meter cell. In 1968, he lived […]
