As a German student studying in Washington, it's sometimes hard for me to believe the absurdities the U.S. political system produces. The ongoing U.S. government shutdown—the product of an inability by political elites to forge lasting compromises, as well as the...
I arrived in Istanbul last September just as protests were flaring up throughout Turkey. An activist had died at a protest in a southern city, one of several victims of the confrontations with riot police over the last year. By the time I got to Taksim Square in the...
Without a doubt, the 68th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy....
As political attention has shifted from a potential U.S. military strike against Syria to a potential agreement on the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons arbitrated by Russia, all eyes are on the United States, the Middle East, and key actors in Europe. But what...
In the New York Times, Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt report that documents Edward Snowden released might have caused less short-term damage than leak of an Al Qaeda plot in August. After media reports, Al Qaeda significantly reduced its use of a major...
At the annual UN General Assembly meeting held in New York, presidents from around the world have the chance to state their views on the key international issues of the day. Not surprisingly, the crisis in Syria, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Millennium...
When Park Geun-hye became president of South Korea earlier this year, there was a sense of unease among many that the election of a dictator’s daughter represented a step backward for the country’s three-decade old democracy. Recent events show those fears to be well...
President Obama has been criticized from both the left and right for his handling of the ongoing civil war in Syria. One of the most curious critiques, however, has to do with his decision to seek Congressional approval for a military strike against regime targets in...
Europe's most powerful nation has voted. On September 22nd, the people of Germany granted Angela Merkel a huge victory, awarding her center-right party nearly 50 percent of the seats in the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Although Merkel’s victory was a foregone...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989. In 1990, when I was in Romania, inter-ethnic conflicts broke out in Transylvania. Although the cause of the conflict in March 1990 in Targu...