Our favorite blog posts and long reads from the past week.
Our favorite blog posts and long reads from the past week.
With the Hungarian parliamentary elections just days away, Western media remains perplexed by the popularity of Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party in polls. Having been denounced time and again as a power-abusing autocrat by outsiders, Orbán’s image within his home country remains relatively unscathed. Many observers have misunderstood the reality of Orbán’s […]
After World War II, the theory that economic integration would reduce the possibility of open conflict between two nation states was tried and was deemed successful by history when France and West Germany signed the first accords that would grow to become the European Union. When Russia recently annexed Crimea, the first response by Western […]
In a wide-ranging discussion with Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association, Dr. Ian Bremmer discusses what he considers to be a disengaged foreign policy by the United States. On April 10, 2014 Dr. Bremmer will be speaking at the Foreign Policy Association on the world’s biggest political risks. Dr. Ian Bremmer is the founder and […]
U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is scheduled to travel to China next week for the first time as Secretary of Defense. Prior to that, Hagel will first travel to Hawai‘i where he will meet with nine of the ten defense ministers from ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), April 1-2. (Thailand’s defense minister, Yingluck […]
Check out our five favorite long reads and blog posts from the past week.
There has been a lot of speculation lately about the impact of the Crimean Crisis on the situations in Syria and Iran. The current negotiations regarding these countries involve cooperation between Russia, the United States, and other countries now directly and indirectly involved on opposites sides of the Crimean question. Naturally, that bodes ill for […]
First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to China with her mother and daughters has been a big soft-power success for the United States. Praised for her style and warmth by ordinary Chinese citizens, Ms. Obama was likewise well-received by Chinese media. The First Lady’s seven-day visit at the invitation of her Chinese counterpart Peng Liyuan has […]
No matter how divided Washington may be when it comes to foreign policy, one aspect proved to forge agreement throughout the 2014 winter: The U.S. should promote free trade, particularly with the European Union, countries along the Pacific Rim and GCC nations. A critical aspect of trade promotion that I’ve seen unfold in my own […]
Our favorite long reads and blog posts from the past week.
Vladimir Putin’s encroachments on Ukraine have drawn Western investment and trade sanctions in response. U.S. sanctions are levied against certain Russian individuals, and serve reasonable diplomatic notice of our opposition. However, we should not look to trade and other economic sanctions as a long term answer to Putin’s aggression. First, it is clear […]
On March 5, China announced that it was increasing its defense budget for 2014 by 12.2 percent over the 2013 level, to $131 billion. Analysts and diplomats greeted the news with complaints that Beijing’s disclosures about its military spending are unduly opaque and often low-ball the actual defense budget by not including many weapons programs. […]
If the 20th century was about an ideological fight between market-economy versus Communism, the 21st could very much be about liberal democracy versus imperialism. This could be the very lesson of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Power politics is – even though it has never disappeared – now a reality that the EU and the U.S. […]
Our five favorite longreads and blog posts from the past week.
As the Ukrainian crisis escalates, President Barack Obama has been busy making the diplomatic rounds trying to build support against the unilateral attempts by Crimea to break away from the new government in Ukraine. President Obama said the United States is examining a series of economic and diplomatic steps to “isolate Russia,” and he called […]