Almost 18 months after the onset of popular democratic protests, the Syrian revolution increasingly resembles a bloody marathon with no clear finish line on the horizon. But as Syrian society slowly disintegrates, non-aligned states from the developing world may show the way forward to a diplomatic resolution.
Governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere are showing signs of greater authoritarianism.
The deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic personnel in Libya calls into the question the efficacy of the NATO intervention in Libya.
Governmental corruption is a huge issue in many of the countries that the United States seeks to influence. Afghanistan is only one of the more notable cases in which corruption is rampant. America has put millions into USAID and State Department projects designed to combat corruption, but there is very little to show for its efforts. To date, no high-level corruption prosecution has gone forward in Afghanistan.
First, threats to burn the Quran, now this.
The Bangkok meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended this week, with no progress among countries to commit to increasing the level of emission reductions for this decade. Why are the climate talks stalemated and what should be done to break the deadlock?
Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” — a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global — has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.
Abolishing both nuclear weapons and war may not be possible without world government.
Syrian rebels have been fighting Bashar al-Assad’s forces for nearly a year and a half in a conflict that has caused 20,000 deaths. As the world watches in horror, much confusion remains about the nature of the rebel troops, the identity of the regime’s supporters, and what actions — if any — should be taken by the rest of the world.
The standoff between Mali’s government and the armed Islamists who control two-thirds of the country is unlikely to resolve peacefully, and the prospects for a new war in the Sahel appear increasingly probable.