On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of construction of a joint South Korean–US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster. If completed, the base would hold more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships […]
Despite the visible role played by some Arab countries — particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia — in the Syrian crisis, the key players in Syria’s ongoing conflict, one must admit, are not Arabs. Even when the Arab countries try to expand their role, and by extension their sway on the course of events in Syria, […]
Anyone seeking to understand Afghanistan in general, the flaws in the United States’ effort there, or life on the ground as a political advisor in the midst of a counterinsurgency, should read The Valley‘s Edge by Daniel Green. The book is a detailed, first-hand account of how a team of U.S. soldiers and civilians, focused on improving […]
In July, when North Korea‘s state media identified Ri Jol Su as the wife of the country’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un, reporting the couple’s visit to an amusement park, the contrast with his father, Kim Jong Il, could not have been starker. State media reports and official accounts of the elder Kim’s activities and behavior never […]
The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport parking lot is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It’s the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those […]
This month, a curious thing happened in the annals of diplomacy. A country offered up a peace plan to put an end to a seemingly endless civil war in Syria. This country was not one of the usual foreign policy suspects — it was not the United States, it was not in Europe, and it wasn’t Syria’s […]
Why is it that Hamas — purveyor of terror, launcher of Iranian-supplied rockets, and source of “death to the Jews” tropes — is getting more attention, traction, legitimacy and support than the “good” Palestinian, the reasonable and grandfatherly Mahmoud Abbas, who has foresworn violence in favor of negotiations? Since the crisis began, President Obama seems to […]
Russia’s T-50 stealth fighter prototype, the first radar-evading warplane outside the U.S. when it debuted in January 2010, is slightly less stealthy than the American F-22 and about equal to the smaller F-35. But in several other respects the new warplane from the Russian Sukhoi design bureau is actually superior to the American models. That’s the […]
From foreign hotel towers sprouting on Colombo‘s seafront to the new motorbikes and mobile phones buzzing in war-ravaged Jaffna, at first glance, Sri Lanka seems to be living up to its claim as Asia’s latest frontier market. But private businesses are not investing enough, threatening the boom that has swept the island since the end […]
The militants of the Palestinian group Hamas are sending a clear message: They are prepared to take great risks to kill Israelis. When it fired rockets at Jerusalem today from the Gaza Strip — the first time Jerusalem has been targeted — Hamas hoped to hit Jewish residents. The rockets, however, might just as easily have damaged Islamic holy […]
looking beyond borders 