The Economist this week (Nov. 14-20) featured a mediocre special report on Brazil. Its message: Brazil is a good investment. So, you finally noticed! Better to have invested in late 2002, when Brazilian assets were selling at prices implying a sovereign default (which didn’t happen). Some good points were made though, notably how this is […]
1) Speculation in Pakistan is increasing over whether President Asif Ali Zardari will survive in office much longer. The constant threat of military coups is the elephant in the room, especially after Zardari attempted to place the ISI under civilian control. Moreover, Pakistani politics are riddled with ever-shifting alliances and corrupt political actors lacking any […]
There are many arguments floating around, including the one I touched on earlier this week, against trying 9/11 suspects in New York. Let’s examine them. 1) It signals the end of the War on Terror. As John Yoo writes in the Wall Street Journal, the decision “is in effect a declaration that this nation is […]
Despite the global recession, the number of Indian billionaires has nearly doubled in just a year. Political science and democratic theorists have long held that the more unequal distribution of wealth, the harder it is to sustain democratic government. Indeed, the Guardian writes that .00001% of India’s population account for a full quarter of its […]
Presidents Hu and Obama finished their summit in Beijing and issued a joint statement. Below, Christiaan Tuntono of CSFB notes that President Obama didn’t get a commitment from China to revalue the RMB against the U.S. dollar, which would effectively increase Chinese demand for U.S. exports. As RMB undervaluation is a key focus of such […]
1) To nobody’s surprise, Somalia is the most corrupt country on earth—followed closely by Iraq and Afghanistan. Transparency International wrote in its report, “When essential institutions are weak or non-existent, corruption spirals out of control.” The task, then, for America is institution building—but is it willing to spend the time and effort to create civil […]
President Obama did a good job this week in China. Goodwill is a valuable intangible in politics, and he engendered some on his Asian trip. Still, the gloss is off the family car — the superpower with hat in hand is an oxymoron. The spectacle of the United States having to go to Beijing to […]
If the United States is going to criticize Pakistan for not securing their border with Afghanistan, maybe we should be making sure that the other side of the border is sealed, too.
Stephen Walt is spot on with this blog post. COIN enthusiasts are among the many in Washington who believe American foreign policy must maintain an aggressive missionary aspect. This isn’t really a problem—we should be striving to make the world a better place—but it currently manifests itself in ways that are prone to failure and […]
Foreign Policy asks the question: “Who Killed Copenhagen?” FP does list hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), but the real culprit is the institution itself: the United States Senate. Indeed, the Senate is where bills go to die. American healthcare reform has been slowed and stalled throughout the year in the upper house. But […]
David Brooks on the NewsHour this past Friday proffered an all too familiar argument. Speaking about the decision to try 9/11 suspects in civilian courts in New York, Brooks said: This trial will become another act of propaganda. The future trials will become other acts of propaganda. And I think we have to understand that […]
A conversation in the comments section of one of last week’s posts deserves its own post. The conversation was geared toward answering this question: If the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rules some act illegal, is the act definitively illegal? Commenter Dan and I took opposing sides, him answering no, me answering yes. My position […]
1) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s State of the Nation address sounds good—but Julia Ioffe is skeptical in the pages of Foreign Policy. 2) A free trade agreement between the United States and Pakistan would be a welcome boon in bilateral relations. 3) This is an example of an exceedingly dry headline. 4) Netanyahu decries potential […]
To the Pakistani military and Internal Services Intelligence: You are reaping what you sowed. But it is not too late to give up the obsessed, crazed determination to retain ‘strategic depth’ vis-a-vis India that has wrought such terrible destruction upon the peoples of South Asia. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the continuation of the […]
So says Gustavo De Las Casas, in an article for Foreign Policy. Basically, the argument is that if the West were to totally decimate the Al-Qaeda network, the global Jihadist movement would disperse, and the local cells that emerged would be that much harder to accurately track, and stop. It’s an intriguing thesis, and certainly […]