Regions

Stable Dictatorship! What is it? The fear that the chaos engulfing Egypt may provide opportunity to anti-American radical Islamic militants to seize power is prompting some Western pundits, journalists, and the Mubarak regime to frame the solution to Egypt’s current crisis as a choice between “chaotic democracy” or “stable dictatorship.” This discourse is also prevalent […]

In the spirit of self-reflection on mistakes made during the Iraq War, former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld is busily promoting his 800 page new memoir, “Known and Unknown,” while defending the Bush administration’s most critical decisions. Appearing on the public circuit for the first time since stepping down in 2006, Rumsfeld has stated that none of the top officials lied about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war.

Last week, the Vietnamese Ambassador to China, Nguyen Van Tho, spoke at a reception hosted by the Vietnamese Embassy in Beijing to celebrate the 61st anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations. The Ambassador stressed that comprehensive cooperation with China was top priority for Vietnam and a major factor in all Vietnamese policy decisions. […]

“The revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt”, writes Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, “is a struggle against what Algerians call hogra, ‘contempt’, a struggle fed by anger over authoritarian rule, torture, corruption, unemployment and inequality, and – a lightning rod everywhere in the Arab world – deference to the US […]

Early morning February 7, 2011, Hikmatullo Saifullozoda, a 60 year old editor of the opposition newspaper Najot and a prominent member of the opposition from the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), was ambushed and brutally beaten by unidentified perpetrators near his home in the capital city Dushanbe. He is currently in a hospital in […]

Last year we saw developments in the EU-China trade relationship that can signify a greater convergence between these two trading partners.  The global financial crisis that led to temporary drop in western demand for Chinese goods during 2009 was followed by an aggressive investment strategy by China in 2010, acquiring a number of businesses in […]

Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb is on a three-day trip to Western Russia this week. After paying a visit to Vyborg, a town of 80,000 inhabitants near southern Finland, he made his way to St. Petersburg, where he spoke at the Russian Geographical Society to launch the Finnish-Russian Arctic Partnership. Stubb remarked, “Let’s keep the […]

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review J. M. Ledgard, the Africa correspondent for The Economist, assesses three new books on Nelson Mandela.

Well, it looks like we may be doing our jobs a bit too well here at the Foreign Policy Association Blogs network. All indications are that our recent disappearance from the web was the result of focused malfeasance that is largely the result of the coverage we have been giving to a host of events […]

Hosni Mubarak’s fall has been widely feared as providing an opportunity for the anti-West Muslim Brotherhood to turn Egypt into a foothold of radical Islam, but a far graver threat could emerge in the very near future — hostile joint Palestinian and Egyptian organization, which today materialized as opposition to the Egyptian embargo on the […]

The cramped bathroom at this week’s Herzliya Conference sums up the Middle East situation quite nicely — Dire Straits. The 1980s rock band has not been a major player in peace process negotiations or efforts to thwart the Iranian nuclear program, but a Dire Straits concert montage continuously streamed into the facilities immediately outside the […]

Last April, the Norwegian and Russian foreign ministers announced that they had begun talks on resolving the 40-year dispute over the maritime border between their two countries in the Barents Sea and Arctic Ocean. In October, Foreign Ministers Jonas Gahr Støre and Sergei Lavrov met again, in Murmansk, this time to sign an treaty on […]