In his compelling essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell links the decline of civilizations to a self-reinforcing relationship between muddy thinking and bad writing. “If thought corrupts language,” he writes, “language can also corrupt thought.” Read Here – National Interest
A confident-looking Abdel Fattah el-Sisi strides across the tarmac at Almaza Air Base, dressed in a blue blazer and his trademark sunglasses. He is not yet Egypt’s head of state, but certainly looks like one Read Here – Politico
For Grant Felgenhauer, a money manager whose hedge fund owns $110 million of Iraqi equities, the 15 explosions that rocked the country on a single day in mid-January weren’t a reason to stop buying. Read Here – Businessweek
History matters, but in different ways. In some places and for some people, history means eternal clashes that are shaped by profound geopolitical forces: four centuries ago is the same as yesterday. Elsewhere and for other people, history suggests a need to find ways to escape from ancient predicaments and outdated prejudices. It is this […]
The coming months will see no end of obituaries written for the emerging world, and of the perils they face. There is nothing new about these prognostications, and they all miss the glaring realities of democratic transformation and its sometimes tumultuous consequences. They miss as well the degree to which hundreds of millions have seen […]
Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern? Read Here […]
U.S. post-2014 development plans for Central Asia are worthy, but at risk of strategic failure. Read Here – The Diplomat
The essence of President Vladimir Putin‘s annual address to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 12 was that his enchantment with state capitalism and Soviet economics is continuing. Rather than promoting higher economic growth, he wanted to go after the remaining prominent private businessmen Read Here – Moscow Times
As a fiscally constrained and war-weary Washington confronts its foreign policy challenges, events in Ukraine and Afghanistan show that economic incentives can play a major role in addressing them. Read Here – The Atlantic
To be sure, Russia and Japan are not natural security partners. In the twentieth century, they fought two wars against each other, first in 1904–05, and again in 1945. Japan seized territory from Russia in the first; Russia seized territory from Japan in the second. In the following decades, the two countries largely kept their […]
looking beyond borders 