Former Ambassador to Turkey, Marc Grossman, is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pick to replace the late Richard Holbrooke. Grossman, the new special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan brings with him decades of foreign policy expertise and a real hand feel for the politics of Islam and Islamist moderation–a real salutary capability that will surely […]
The Obama administration has long sought to change the Muslim world’s opinions on American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. From President Obama’s much hailed speech and somewhat prescient speech on democracy in the Middle East that he offered at the University of Cairo, to his under-appreciated attempts to correctly pronunciation the name of Muslim […]
According to US Census data, Miami is home to the largest Cuban community outside of the island nation; the New York metropolitan area is in second place, with a population of over 141,000 Cubans. So New York City’s embrace of Cuban culture is no surprise, but the city’s ability to put on the upcoming “¡Sí […]
Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney have in an interesting article, contented that “both in its rot and heady dynamism, India is beginning to resemble America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900).” The article in Financial Times, titled “It is time for India to reign in its robber barrons”, Sinha and Varshney question the possibility of India’s transition from […]
Hosni Mubarak is gone and the streets of Cairo look like a million Mardi Gras. But as Egyptians celebrate their revolution, a different kind of transition has taken place in Lebanon. In less than thirty days, the pro-Western March 14 coalition shifted from majority to opposition, leaving Washington scrambling for a strategy. The trouble is […]
Stable Dictatorship! What is it? The fear that the chaos engulfing Egypt may provide opportunity to anti-American radical Islamic militants to seize power is prompting some Western pundits, journalists, and the Mubarak regime to frame the solution to Egypt’s current crisis as a choice between “chaotic democracy” or “stable dictatorship.” This discourse is also prevalent […]
In the spirit of self-reflection on mistakes made during the Iraq War, former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld is busily promoting his 800 page new memoir, “Known and Unknown,” while defending the Bush administration’s most critical decisions. Appearing on the public circuit for the first time since stepping down in 2006, Rumsfeld has stated that none of the top officials lied about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war.
Last week, the Vietnamese Ambassador to China, Nguyen Van Tho, spoke at a reception hosted by the Vietnamese Embassy in Beijing to celebrate the 61st anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations. The Ambassador stressed that comprehensive cooperation with China was top priority for Vietnam and a major factor in all Vietnamese policy decisions. […]
“The revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt”, writes Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, “is a struggle against what Algerians call hogra, ‘contempt’, a struggle fed by anger over authoritarian rule, torture, corruption, unemployment and inequality, and – a lightning rod everywhere in the Arab world – deference to the US […]
Early morning February 7, 2011, Hikmatullo Saifullozoda, a 60 year old editor of the opposition newspaper Najot and a prominent member of the opposition from the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), was ambushed and brutally beaten by unidentified perpetrators near his home in the capital city Dushanbe. He is currently in a hospital in […]
Last year we saw developments in the EU-China trade relationship that can signify a greater convergence between these two trading partners. The global financial crisis that led to temporary drop in western demand for Chinese goods during 2009 was followed by an aggressive investment strategy by China in 2010, acquiring a number of businesses in […]
Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb is on a three-day trip to Western Russia this week. After paying a visit to Vyborg, a town of 80,000 inhabitants near southern Finland, he made his way to St. Petersburg, where he spoke at the Russian Geographical Society to launch the Finnish-Russian Arctic Partnership. Stubb remarked, “Let’s keep the […]
In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review J. M. Ledgard, the Africa correspondent for The Economist, assesses three new books on Nelson Mandela.
Well, it looks like we may be doing our jobs a bit too well here at the Foreign Policy Association Blogs network. All indications are that our recent disappearance from the web was the result of focused malfeasance that is largely the result of the coverage we have been giving to a host of events […]
Hosni Mubarak’s fall has been widely feared as providing an opportunity for the anti-West Muslim Brotherhood to turn Egypt into a foothold of radical Islam, but a far graver threat could emerge in the very near future — hostile joint Palestinian and Egyptian organization, which today materialized as opposition to the Egyptian embargo on the […]