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Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador swept into power promising to use the wealth of natural resources in their countries to help address widespread poverty and stabilize the economy. Both improved situations enough to win reelection, but both also seem to have a strong grip on power and willingness to curtail democracy […]

Thanks to fracking and the oil rush in North Dakota, many analysts predict energy independence for North America, and even for the U.S. itself. The most recent high-profile prediction came from Citigroup’ s global commodities research team, headed by Edward Morse. They issued an 85-page report, which sadly is not available for free, on the […]

  Last year I reported on the gradual opening of the political environment in Burma (last update here), including the incorporation of former dissident Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party National League of Democracy into parliament. The “Great Decisions in Foreign Policy” series on PBS — produced by Foreign Policy Association — has taken a […]

My colleague Dr. Greg Austin and I wrote a short discussion paper titled “Cybersecurity: Crime Prevention  or Warfare?”  for the 49th Munich Security Conference which took place this February in Munich, Germany. We identified some of the top challenges pertaining to cybersecurity and outlined six policy action ideas. Given the recent revelations about the Chinese […]

  From a global perspective, any new entry into the “nuclear club” is high undesirable as such: With every new entrant, there is an exponential increase in the political complexity of achieving total nuclear disarmament — or, to put it more simply, there is an additional obstacle in the way of eliminating all weapons of […]

The question of whether genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are helpful or harmful has persisted since the 1970s, but reached no solid conclusion. As the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to hear oral arguments on Tuesday, February 19 in Bowman v. Monsanto Co. that will have far-reaching implications for the GMO debate: whether self-replicating technologies can […]

The last time Zimbabwe made widespread international headlines occurred as the country descended into violence following the contested 2008 presidential elections. That chapter in Zimbabwean history ended with the Global Political Agreement (GPA) that split power between President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The final conditions of […]

In 2011, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the BMW Group forged a partnership to create a new model for collaboration between the private sector and the UN.  Founded in 2005 under the leadership of the Governments of Turkey and Spain with former Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the head of a group of experts, […]

Zero Dark Thirty was among the few of the year’s major Oscar-nominated films that I had not seen, so I went earlier this month, somewhat reluctantly. Many far more informed than I (including Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) in a letter to the CIA, as well as Steve Coll in the […]

“We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible” — Vince Lombardi Will Secretary of State Kerry prove to be a master of the foreign relations game by overcoming the seemingly impossible? Or will he have a hard time finding his footing on the slippery geopolitical pitch and achieve […]

For decades there have been conversations, tough questions, “ah-ha” moments, deep insights and common sense shared in one-on-one exchanges with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. In all those times interacting with them, watching them, analyzing them, not one umbrella has been spotted. These men are not appeasers or pleasers. They are not those who seek […]

Documentary exposes Pakistan gender biases A documentary film screened at the Sundance Film Festival chronicles the fallout in Pakistan after a 13-year-old girl, gang-raped by four men, took her attackers to court and was nearly put to death by village elders. The case of Kainat Soomro reveals gender biases in the country that make laws […]