U.S. Arms Trade Treaty Blocked…Does It Have A Future?

Iran, Syria and North Korea have prevented the adoption of the first international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade, complaining that it was flawed and failed to ban weapons sales to rebel groups. To get around the blockade, British U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant sent the draft treaty to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and asked him […]

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Can the BRICS Have Their Own World Bank?

The five countries known as the BRICS have 43 percent of the world’s population, $4.4 trillion in currency reserves, and generally healthier economic growth than Europe and the U.S. Yet to their frustration, Americans and Europeans still dominate policymaking at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Should the five—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and […]

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The Return Of The Great Game

As the U.S. and coalition forces prepare to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with all combat forces out by the end of 2014, the governments of Central Asia are bracing for a possible spillover of instability from their south. Ostensibly to help Central Asian countries protect themselves against the Islamist radicals that may gain strength in […]

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Xi’s foreign debut illuminates China’s ‘world dream’

On Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping embarked on his first overseas trip sincetaking office last week, and experts here believe the trip will clarify Xi’s recent references to China’s “world dream.” Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China, said, “The tripwill reveal some important features of Xi’s concept of world order. “”From the destinations of Xi’s first foreign trip, we can tell that China is committed to promotingdemocratization in international relations as well as a more just and reasonable internationalorder and system,” he said. Read Here – China Daily

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Xi In Russia

The atmospherics surrounding Xi Jinping’s coming trip to Russia – his first visit to a foreign country as China’s new president – remind me of a slogan from my early childhood in the late 1950’s: “Russia-China, Friendship Forever.” The irony is that, even in that slogan’s heyday, Sino-Russian relations were deteriorating fast, culminating in spasms […]

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Holes In The BRICs

In 2001, when Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the world had high hopes for the four emerging economies, whose combined GDP was expected to reach $128.4 trillion by 2050, dwarfing America’s projected GDP of $38.5 trillion. When the four countries’ leaders gather on March 26 […]

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