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 […]
China’s military shipyards now are surpassing Western European, Japanese, and Korean military shipbuilders in terms of both the types and numbers of ships they can build. If Beijing prioritizes progress, China’s military shipbuilding technical capabilities can likely become as good as Russia’s are now by 2020 and will near current U.S. shipbuilding technical proficiency levels […]
October is a scary month. And it’s not just Halloween. October also happens to be the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And if the ghosts and goblins don’t make you wet your pants, the thought of Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Castro dancing on the edge of nuclear war should. During the Cold War, the United […]
The Middle East is undergoing a historic transformation. Parts of the region are up in flames, and Asia’s primary powers either have no role or a destructive one. Pakistan, Indonesia and other Asian Muslim countries, as well as India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, are largely uninvolved, as if events in the region have no […]
The party of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych has claimed victory in a closely fought parliamentary election. Officials from the Party of Regions said the result showed Ukrainians had confidence in their leader. Partial exit polls suggested Mr Yanukovych’s party had gained the most votes, but opposition parties did better than expected. Thousands of observers are in Ukraine […]
In the post-bipolar era, the security architecture of Europe had to be adapted and the main European security actors undertook internal and external changes. The principal challenge has been the re-approximation of former enemies, namely the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia. The main remaining institution available to assume security and defense responsibilities was […]
It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in Mongolia, the large country of high desert plains sandwiched between China and Russia, and much has changed. Some, education and food supply, is for the better, and a lot – including urban sprawl and rising inequality – is for the worse. Much of the change has to […]
Remember Aleksandr Bastrykin’s “forest scandal“? In light of the horrors Leonid Razvozzhayev says he endured, merely hauling a journalist out into the woods and threatening his life looks positively quaint. Bastrykin has managed to survive — and indeed thrive — amid not just the forest incident, but also the revelations about his unreported properties and business dealings in Europe. And his sharp […]
Ukraine‘s parliamentary election on Sunday will be neither free nor fair. After eight unproductive years since the 2004 Orange Revolution, the democratic opposition is depressed and demoralized. Even so, the elections may check President Viktor Yanukovych‘s power. Yanukovych came to power in February 2010 in elections that were rated free and fair. This was a time when Freedom House still ranked Ukraine as democratic. But Yanukovych […]
Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries, known as the BRICs: Brazil, […]
looking beyond borders 