In fact, Saudi Arabia is no state at all. There are two ways to describe it: as a political enterprise with a clever but ultimately unsustainable business model, or as an entity so corrupt as to resemble a vertically and horizontally integrated criminal organization. Either way, it can’t last. It’s past time U.S. decision-makers began […]
PRIME MINISTER Nawaz Sharif has declared developing Pakistan’s external economy a national priority. He should be applauded for focusing on tackling a major weakness. However, Pakistan’s interest in trade is not new, and is a case study in lost opportunities. Read Here – Dawn
As vast as China’s investment in Africa certainly is, speculation has steered the conversation onto a misleading, and perhaps antagonistic tangent. Recent findings suggest that Chinese investment in Africa is more nuanced than commonly believed. Read Here – The Diplomat
Among the multiple existential challenges facing the European Union this year – refugees, populist politics, German-inspired austerity, government bankruptcy in Greece and perhaps Portugal – one crisis is well on its way to resolution. Britain will not vote to leave the EU. Read Here – Project Syndicate
When identifying threats to Himalayan ecosystems, China stands out. For years, the People’s Republic has been engaged in frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau. Now it is ramping up efforts to spur its bottled-water industry – the world’s largest and fastest-growing – to siphon off glacier […]
Russia has already made its turn towards Asia, and the important question now is how deep and successful it will be. It is also critical what forms and substance it will assume, what costs and benefits it will bring, and whether it will be accompanied, in the best tradition of Russian political maximalism, by an […]
U.S. President Barack Obama will host the leaders of the ten countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in an unprecedented U.S.-ASEAN summit meeting on February 15 and 16 at Sunnylands in California. Read Here – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said his country is in a new Cold War with the U.S. and its allies, underscoring the tenuous level of trust that’s putting a day-old plan for a truce in Syria at risk. Read Here – Bloomberg Medvedev’s Speech in Munich
Since the fall of Communism, Russia has concentrated on internal matters—yes, sometimes in a manner contrary to our values. Its leaders and policies have been seriously flawed. If Russia is expanding its military capabilities, this is a trend we must attend to, but that does not reactivate its status as our enemy, writes Dana Rohrabacher, a California […]
Next week, at a summit in California, US President Barack Obama will meet with the leaders of the ten countries of Asia’s most important regional grouping: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The event, the first-ever US-ASEAN summit on American soil, is being touted as a sign of America’s growing interest in Southeast Asia. The […]
looking beyond borders 