In The News

North Korea: Life After Kim

Shim Jae Hoon September 26, 2008
Uncertainty and infighting await nations that lack a strategy for leadership succession. The Kim family has ruled North Korea since it declared independence in 1948, but Kim Jong Il has not groomed his children for leadership. So speculation centers on them along with Kim’s fourth wife, Kim Ok, who visited Washington during the waning days of the Clinton administration. Analysts anticipate an...

Pakistan on the Brink

Ahmed Rashid September 19, 2008
The US shotgun marriage with Pakistan, arranged after the 9/11 attacks in order to launch the US “war on terror,” has begun to fall apart, and in the process endangers the very state of Pakistan. The US detoured to Iraq and relied on Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf as an ally to manage the region. He’s gone and during the long period of US neglect, both Afghanistan, original...

Will Kashmir Protests and Terrorism Thwart India’s Global Ambitions?

Harsh V. Pant September 15, 2008
Before summer of 2008, India and Pakistan were gradually normalizing relations and edging toward agreement on territorial claims in Kashmir. But the longstanding dispute, in play since Pakistan separated from India, remains a live issue for politicians and extremists in India and abroad, to exploit and throw a spanner in the works for the country’s global ambition, suggests Harsh V. Pant,...

Egypt: Will the Dam Burst?

September 15, 2008
Poverty and bitterness seethe in Egypt: “The fact is that most of Egypt’s 75m people struggle to get by, their ambitions thwarted by rising prices, appalling state schools, capricious judges, a plodding and corrupt bureaucracy and a cronyist regime that pretends democracy but in fact crushes all challengers and excludes all participation,” the Economist reports. Pent-up frustration contributes to...

Russia and a New Democratic Realism

Francis Fukuyama September 12, 2008
The weakened Russia of the 1990s has bulked up into a formidable nation that makes the former satellites of the Soviet Union uneasy. In the meantime, the US allowed negotiation opportunities and moral credibility to slip away. The US invasion of Iraq and support of separation for Kosovo handed an excuse to others that might invade sovereign states for regime change or disgruntled provinces that...

America and the World Into a New Era – Part III

Klaus Naumann September 8, 2008
The 21st century poses new dangers on many fronts for democratic nations – terrorism, organized crime, cyber warfar, nuclear proliferation and failing states. Those dangers divide rather than unite the 26 member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which includes European democracies, Canada and the US. In the final article of this three-part series on US relations with the world,...

America and the World Into a New Era – Part II

Shada Islam September 4, 2008
One of the goals of the Treaty on European Union, signed in 1992, was for the continent “to assert its identity on the international scene, in particular through the implementation of a common foreign and security policy including the eventual framing of a common defence policy, which might in time lead to a common defence.” At the time, many anticipated Europe to continue a strong and enduring...