This week: Dennis Rodman hangs out in North Korea, Hugo Chavez dies, America plays out its fiscal drama, and Bashar al-Assad follows in his father’s footsteps.
This week: Dennis Rodman hangs out in North Korea, Hugo Chavez dies, America plays out its fiscal drama, and Bashar al-Assad follows in his father’s footsteps.
The news media lit up late Thursday on news that North Korea threatened to use preemptive nuclear warfare against the United States and canceled its non-aggression pact with South Korea. The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, equipped with nuclear capabilities, seems less interested in peace and only throughout the last 24 hours upped […]
“A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism.” — Simon Bolivar Regrettably, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez did not heed the sage words of his […]
Last week, Raul Castro announced that he would step down from power in 2018. The last Castro to leave the seat of power in Havana is effectively ending a half-century long novella starting in the 1950s, etching the names of Castro and Che across all of Cuba and world history. The strength of the left […]
As values of certain ideas fluctuate with fashion and practicality, so has that of COIN, or counter-insurgency, one of the principal war-fighting approaches in recent years for U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such is the main argument in Fred Kaplan’s recent Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb 2013) essay “The End of the Age of Petraeus: The […]
Sequestration bringing you down? Turn off CNN and check out Foreign Policy Blogs editors’ must-read pieces from around the web.
(Pictiure from Tribeca Films/New York Times) Oh dear. In a (quite positive) review of the new film War Witch, which is set in an anonymous Sub-Saharan African country (but was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo and clearly is intended to evoke that country’s conflicts), Stephen Holden drops this little observation: “Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, […]
Just when things are hotting up again with its neighbors in the East and South China Seas, Beijing faces new challenges from its western neighbors in Central Asia. A report released on February 27 entitled “China’s Central Asia Problem” issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based non-governmental organization tasked with reducing deadly conflict, […]
At a high-level executive meeting in Mexico City on Feb. 13, the conversation turned, as it often does in Latin American circles, into a guessing game on Chavez´ health. Several participants insisted ¨Chavez is dead, we haven´t heard from him or seen him in weeks.¨ My response? The man is too ornery to pass away […]
With the French military intervention in Mali shifting to a more sustained action, the reality of the long, hard slog in the Mali region has triggered inevitable questions by diplomats, policy planners and many others as to what defines success – and what comes next? Most mouthed answer: “Somalia.” That’s correct. The place […]
Image lifted from the Express Tribune “Hazaras” are Persian-speaking people from Afghanistan, who trace their lineage to Ghengis Khan, emperor of the Mongol Empire. Many migrated to British India and worked in coal mines situated in what we now know as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It is estimated that more than 500,000 Hazaras now live in Quetta, […]
Prior to his departure to Europe and the Middle East, Secretary of State John Kerry went to the University of Virginia to deliver his first public policy speech, which focused predominantly on explaining to his audience that U.S. foreign policy and assistance has a direct impact upon domestic policy and vice versa. Secretary Kerry […]
President Hamid Karzai will go down in Afghan history as a weird sort – of politician, of man, who dresses with flagrant panache, favoring a mix of traditional outfits and English tailored clothes and who lives a strangely, elegantly mixed up pro-Western and half-traditional life, guarded, in Kabul. In his politics, too, he favors a […]
The Egyptian government is quite busy these days dealing with continued unrest, instability, and economic woes. Yet it has somehow found both the will and the resources to flood some of the smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza. Former president Hosni Mubarak’s regime attempted on a few occasions to destroy the tunnels, but this policy […]
The Washington Monument–a massive obelisk within sight of both the White House and Capitol — and Israel, a small democracy wedged in between its enemies — are not often mentioned in the same article or newscast. However, with the $1.2 trillion sequestration cuts set to slash funding across the federal government within days, both Israel […]