It’s a start, but it’s only the beginning. During his trip to Moscow last week, President Barack Obama made small steps in improving relations between the United States and Russia. Notably, the countries agreed in principle to cut their nuclear arsenals and allow American troops and weapons bound for the war in Afghanistan to fly […]
Who will come out of the economic downturn on top? Will the rising powers continue to rise? Even though many analysts believe the financial crisis originated in the United States, the International Economic Bulletin published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace contends that it is one of the least affected countries. The unequal impact […]
What China needs to reduce corruption is not more high-profile capital punishment cases, but a free press and an independent, de-politicized judiciary and police force that will fairly implement and adjudicate the law. Monopoly rule from the top makes it hard to develop such institutions.[…]
Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, made a controversial statement today. He predicts that China will attack India by 2012 in order to distract its massive populace from rampant internal unrest. He stated: “China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India […]
Time to re-read Huntington? His controversial and path-breaking Foreign Affairs article of 1993 and subsequent book posited that the post-Cold War era would be one of conflict and “fault line wars” among the world’s major civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, and Latin American and possibly African… Is the current unrest in China’s western […]
Ethnic tensions are high in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in Western China. Rioters clashed with police – the largest protests in China in two decades – in the region’s capital, Urumqi, on Sunday and the Chinese state news agency reported that 156 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Over 1,400 people have […]
Disarmament doesn’t usher in a safer world, arming with the right armaments, defensive armaments, does. […]
Demonstrating their global reach, Brazil, Russia, India and China are improving ties with Africa. The BRICs are looking to gain influence, friends, access to raw materials and export markets. Standard Bank of South Africa is publishing a “BRIC in Africa” series focusing on the new players in Africa (the initial report was released in May […]
The Economist developed a multimedia feature about the rich world’s rapidly aging population and the anticipated economic consequences. “At present, the developed countries on average have about four people of working age for every person over 65. But by 2050 this will have come down to only two workers for every pensioner.” With people living […]
Today the American Dollar was met with both encouraging and potentially disheartening news. First, the Dollar rose against the Australian Dollar, Swiss Franc and Yen as China announced that the USD will continue to remain the world’s leading trade currency. In addition, Beijing said it will not make changes to its foreign-exchange reserves. This comes […]
Despite the disputed election results and events of the last two weeks, diplomacy remains America’s best option with Iran. In some of his strongest words about Iran’s government, President Obama said on Friday that “there is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of […]
Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, argues in his latest op-ed that Russia has wasted the financial crisis. “Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off,” writes Mr. Friedman. “The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic […]
Whether or not Russia is a rising power (and it’s been suffering on the economic front lately), it certainly does have a national drinking problem. The British medical journal The Lancet produced a study on worldwide use of alcohol and its relationship to cause of death. It discovered a sobering statistic: that 1 in every […]
Why should we trust them? Economists in think tanks the world over got it wrong before this crisis. Now, many of them point to the “Black Swan” event, the large-impact, hard-to-predict rare event, to explain away their flawed work and keep their jobs. Yet the data were there – reversion of U.S. households to […]
The Great Recession was supposed to be the death of the decoupling debate. The theory that emerging markets were no longer dependent on developed countries for growth – and in some way insulated from the financial troubles in the West – was discredited as no one was left untouched by the economic crisis. Arvind Subramanian, […]