Even as Xi Jinping gets ready to assume the presidency of China this month, jockeying has begun for 2017 when rising stars of the ruling Communist Party move into top leadership posts. China’s first and second generation Communist Party leaders, such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, ruled as single paramount leaders. But over the past two decades, […]
It is striking that, more than a decade after America‘s 9/11 wars began, the U.S. military has not conducted a probing review of what it did wrong in handling the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to do better next time. Even as the Vietnam War wound down, the U.S. Army took a hard […]
Rage against the political establishment has become a global phenomenon. Chinese bloggers, American Tea Party activists, British Europhobes, Egyptian Islamists, Dutch populists, Greek ultra-rightists, and Thai “red shirts” all have one thing in common: hatred of the status quo and contempt for their countries’ elites. We are living in an age of populism. The authority of conventional […]
It’s 10 years since the overthrow of Saddam and 25 since he ordered the Kurdish genocide. I can guarantee that you will not hear much about Saddam’s atrocities in the coming weeks. As Bayan Rahman, the Kurdish ambassador to London, said to me: “Everyone wants to remember Fallujah and no one wants to remember Halabja.” […]
No one really believed that the latest round of international negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program would produce a breakthrough. So it was no surprise that itdid not, despite the concessions that were made at the meeting in Kazakhstan by the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus Germany). […]
A case can be made that most significant political actor in the past six years in Pakistan is the country’s Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. After all, it is Chaudhry who has redefined the role of the country’s high courts in matters of public interest. Read Here – The Diplomat
It’s immediately apparent that he is in poor health. He is overweight, his face is puffy and, as he says, he has spent the last one-and-a-half years “almost entirely in the hospital.” He has had four operations in five years and suffers from severe diabetes. He was even erroneously reported dead on Twitter last May. […]
Will India rival or even surpass China’s rise?…Lee Kuan Yew disagrees strongly. As he puts it, provocatively: “When Nehru was in charge, I thought India showed promise of becoming a thriving society and a great power,” but it has not “because of its stifling bureaucracy” and its “rigid caste system.” Being deliberately provocative, Lee says: […]
President Obama‘s visit to the Middle East next month is widely billed as an earnest attempt to double down on diplomacy and revive the moribund peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against the president. Doves on both sides quietly cede that it would take a miracle to get the two sides back […]
Secretary of State John Kerry’s first foreign trip is an impressive swing through nine countries in Europe and the Middle East. But I wonder if he should instead have visited just two countries, China and Japan. That’s where the most significant and dangerous new developments in international relations are unfolding. The world’s second- and third-largest […]
looking beyond borders 