One future is an Asia that is relatively familiar: a region whose economies continue to enjoy robust levels of growth and manage to avoid conflict with one another. The second future could hardly be more different: an Asia of increased tensions, rising military budgets, and slower economic growth. Read Here – Council On Foreign Relations
November 22 will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For people alive at the time, it was one of those events that are so shocking that you remember where you were when you heard the news. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Based on its actual behavior, rather than words, Washington seems to have redefined its core national interests in the Middle East a few years ago during the first term of the Barack Obama presidency, says Rami Khouri Read Here – The Daily Star, Beirut
Contrary to what environmentalists, anti-globalisation campaigners and other economic curmudgeons like to think, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, writes Allister Heath Read Here – The Telegraph, London
Shinzo Abe’s first, brief premiership ended in disaster. Yet now, recovered from debilitating illness, the conservative nationalist is back in power and, emboldened by “Abenomics”, is determined to revitalise Japan after many years of decline. Read Here – The New Statesman
This isn’t all the tutors’ fault: when you have to lecture to 400 students at once, it’s hard to find time and space to go off-piste. But the result is that economics students come out of exam halls and go off to government departments or the City with exactly the same toolkit that just five […]
China’s international role is changing. But the country is struggling to reconcile its traditional foreign policy of non-interference with its growing economic presence around the world. Read Here – Asia Centre
The middle class in China remains an essential part of the state from which it has emerged and is not very likely to be the Chinese equivalent of the European or North American bourgeoisie with whom it is often equated. Read Here – Christian Science Monitor
One of Pope Benedict XVI’s big concerns as pontiff was the decline of Christianity in Europe as secularization has spread. For instance, he regretted that, despite strong Vatican pressure, the drafters of the EU Constitution had not seen fit to include anywhere a reference to Europe’s Christian roots. Read Here – WorldAffairsJournal
Since the so-called Visegrad Four—the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia—shook off the Soviet yoke and topped a decade of successful political and economic reform by rejoining the West in its most exclusive clubs, the European Union and NATO, they have begun to pursue their own objectives, and they have distinguished themselves as actors on […]
looking beyond borders 