Europe and the U.S. may be in grim economic straits, but the Islamic Republic of Iran is doing just fine—at least if Iran's leaders are to be believed. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has insisted relentlessly that his country's economy is healthy, while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has christened the current Iranian calendar year as the "Year of Domestic Production and Support for Iranian Capital and Labor."
Across the Middle East, hopes for Arab-Israeli peace face obstacles that, of late, are rising on multiple fronts.
Fatah and Hamas are working toward a coalition government, which will further empower a terrorist group that's sworn to Israel's destruction and isolate Palestinian moderates; a candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood is assuming the presidency in Egypt while the emerging government is threatening to upend the longstanding Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty; and an Iranian regime that increasingly threatens Israel's destruction continues to make progress toward nuclear weaponry.
Italian prosecutors have now detained the former head of the Vatican’s bank after searching his home and former office for suspected criminal behavior. Catholics and followers of the Holy See will be disappointed to learn that the Vatican’s bank appears to be embroiled in yet another financial scandal.
For all their ideological fervor, revolutions in practice tend to be fairly predictable affairs. More often than not, when the initial groundswell of popular discontent recedes, the best-organized and most ideologically cohesive political factions assume power and proceed to run the show according to their own preferences.
Law enforcement officials in China, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines have launched a blitzkrieg targeting money launderers who have been swindling and blackmailing average citizens throughout Asia to the tune of millions of dollars.
Delivering her Nobel Lecture after a 21-year delay, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi offered a timely reminder from the front lines of struggle.
“To be forgotten,” she said in her October 16th address in Oslo, “… is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity. When I met Burmese migrant workers and refugees during my recent visit to Thailand, many cried out, ‘Don’t forget us!’ They meant: ‘Don’t forget our plight, don’t forget to do what you can to help us, don’t forget we also belong to your world.’
On Wednesday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched down in Brazil for his first state visit to the South American nation since 2009. The ostensible reason is to attend the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, a high-profile gathering of more than 100 heads of state taking place in Rio de Janeiro. But high on Ahmadinejad’s priority list is an important bit of diplomacy: reinvigorating the once-robust ties between Tehran and Brasilia. For Iran, Brazil is a potential economic lifeline in the face of mounting international pressure.
On Monday and Tuesday, all eyes will be on Russia as it hosts the third round in the troubled international negotiations now under way between Iran and the West over the former's nuclear program.
How real is the potential for cyberwar? The growing attention being given to cyberspace by policymakers and the media alike reflects an inescapable reality. With government agencies and private companies under frequent attack in cyberspace, and with incidents of cyber espionage increasing in both intensity and frequency, it would be fair to say that the U.S. is already engaged in battle in cyberspace.
Bernard Lewis’ new book, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, written at the age of 95, is essentially his autobiography. Since he is, above all, a scholar, much of his life has been thinking and writing. Not surprisingly, the book recounts the gestational process of a number of his major works. Lewis is the author of more than 30 books. This leads him to wonder, in 100 years, which of his works will be remembered? I venture to say that it will not be this one, nor does he mean it to be. This is a breezy, episodic, conversational book of reflections, aperçus, anecdotes, and some very sharp observations. It is what is called a “good read.” It is not particularly profound or deep. It only glancingly refers to ideas that Lewis has developed at greater length in his earlier works. He refers to them rather than repeating them, and places their development in the context of his long life.
In the sixteen months since the ouster of its long-serving strongman, Hosni Mubarak, one question has stood at the heart of the turbulent political debate taking place in Egypt: who will ultimately end up in charge?
"Life," the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, "must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards."
What's true of individuals is true of nations. As we, as a nation, look back in an effort to understand our history, we invariably question some of the decisions we made -- and the horror we tolerated.
After early signs it might try to exert pressure on Iran, China seems to be easing up. Unfortunately for the West, all roads lead through Beijing.
What is less understood is Tehran's abuse of the financial sector, banks, front companies, and other deceptive techniques to evade controls responsible countries have instituted to stop it from achieving nuclearization.
With two important diplomatic victories last month, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for the final chapters of the Afghan war.
When it comes to international diplomacy, success tends to be in the eye of the beholder. That’s certainly been the case in the latest bout of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
Nearly 40 years ago, a Congress disgusted with the value-less foreign policy realism of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford began to require the State Department to report each year on the human rights records of other countries.
Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program.
To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other "P5+1" negotiators - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - want a deal.
One of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere is the city of Warnes, Bolivia, which lies a few kilometers outside the country’s industrial capital of Santa Cruz. There, set back in an open field off a bustling highway, is the new regional defense school of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA—the eight-member economic and geopolitical bloc founded by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro nearly a decade ago.
Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has made cybersecurity a major area of policy focus. The past year in particular has seen a dramatic expansion of governmental awareness of cyberspace as a new domain of conflict. In practice, however, this attention is still uneven. To date, it has focused largely on network protection and resiliency (particularly in the military arena) and on the threat potential of countries such as China and Russia. Awareness of what is perhaps the most urgent cybermenace to the U.S. homeland has lagged behind the times.