Forty-seven years ago this month, Pakistan’s then Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, while on a visit to Vienna, had an unscheduled chat with a young, obscure nuclear scientist called Munir Ahmad Khan. “I briefed him about what I knew of India’s nuclear programme and the facilities that I had seen myself during a visit to […]
Days after Xi Jinping became chief in 2002 of Zhejiang, China’s hotbed of private enterprise, he set out on a tour of the province. His message: more capitalism. Promoted five years later to the party’s top policy making body in Beijing, and heir-apparent to President Hu Jintao, Xi lectured students at the Communist Party’s main school, by the […]
It’s just a few hours to the end of the race, but Race isn’t going to end anytime soon. It was pretty ugly in the 2008 presidential poll, too. Yet, 2012 makes that year seem benign. On the last lap, Mitt Romney is running as the Great White Hope, a Captain America against the illegal […]
Greatness is an odd word because it signifies both quantity and quality. In the case of Russia, the two are easily confused. Even after the huge territorial losses incurred with the Soviet collapse, Russia still accounts for one-seventh of the Earth’s surface. Therefore, it has a geographical imperative to think big. Russia is unlike Britain and France, which shrank back to their middle-sized home nations after losing their […]
China is “the most threatening actor in cyberspace” as its intelligence agencies and hackers use increasingly sophisticated techniques to gain access to U.S. military computers and defense contractors, according to the draft of an annual report mandated by Congress. Chinese hackers are moving into “increasingly advanced types of operations or operations against specialized targets,” such as […]
There’s a lot to learn in the aftermath of a natural disaster, especially about your elected officials, as anyone living in New York and New Jersey can tell you. Natural disasters separate effective policies from ineffective ones because those policies are suddenly required to work, and politicians are judged by how they respond and how […]
From the moment the presidential race started taking shape, it was clear that along with being a contest between two candidates, the election would also be a contest between two different approaches to winning. Team Romney and its super PAC allies signaled that they would raise a ton of money to run a traditional campaign […]
Last November, Michelle Makori, a business reporter formerly of Bloomberg News, joined a small group of seasoned Western television journalists for a whirlwind tour of China. The trip, arranged by China Central Television (CCTV), the world’s largest broadcaster, culminated in a visit to the network’s two headquarters: on the quiet, far west side of Beijing, […]
After all the drama of the past few days, it may seem anticlimactic to suggest that not much has changed in the election. That’s what the latest polls are telling us, though. Going into the final weekend of the campaign, it’s still a tight race, but President Obama retains a distinct advantage in the electoral […]
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 […]
