Construction has been one of the main drivers of China’s economic growth, responsible for roughly 15 percent of GDP in recent years. But as the Financial Times notes, China’s housing market has two faces: a frothy bubble in the biggest cities, where house prices are out of reach for all but the wealthiest Chinese, and hangover and […]

After discussing the conflict in Syria with President Barack Obama at the G-20 Summit this week (Zaman), Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued fresh calls for action against the regime (Radikal). Three days later, spokesman for Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Selcuk Ünal, denied claims published in the New York Times that Ankara had paid for shipments […]

I had planned to spend most of yesterday, Sunday, working in the garden, particularly harvesting and culling our plums. I have three trees: two standard purple, and one golden blush Japanese hybrid. But it got hot, I got most of the work done, and I couldn’t help but read the Sunday papers. And doing so, […]

The Egyptian People have spoken, and the military has dutifully recognized Mohammed Morsi as the country’s first democratically elected president.The timing of this announcement (and the long delay while ballots were, ahem, processed) is indicative of a calculated political move by the ruling generals. It is likely that the military and the Morsi camp talked […]

Is America “pivoting” in Asia, or “rebalancing?” This is the kind of question that keeps bureaucrats writing long memos, but in the real world the labels are less important than the facts. In his recent speech at the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta adopted the term “rebalancing” to denote Washington’s enhanced […]

In most western countries, central banks are, at least in theory, wholly divorced from the political process. Central bankers are selected to terms far longer than that of the average politician—and they are typically allowed to oversee numerous changes in political leadership during their time at the helm—in order to insulate them from the rough […]

Our weekend forecast is looking good: Syria shooting down a Turkish fighter jet appears unlikely to spark an international intervention as the EU and NATO nations urge caution from the Turks: “We will be obviously looking to Turkey to be restrained in its response” —Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief. “Military intervention in Syria […]

For a time, Stalin was a big supporter of Israel, and its war of independence was won thanks in part to weapons delivered from communist Czechoslovakia with Stalin’s blessing. Relations cooled during the Cold War, especially as Israel aligned more closely with Washington. On Monday, Vladimir Putin visits Jerusalem in his first foreign tour since […]

We’ve been tracking the slow-motion car crash that is the European Union for a while here at Via Meadia, and it gets to feel like we’re writing the same post over and over again. The buck-passing, the institutional paralysis and the general denial that anything is systemically wrong seems to be so ingrained in European […]

Fault Line For an overview of exceptionalism in the Middle East, I turned to David Welch, a career Foreign Service Officer. He served in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and as the U.S. Ambasador to Egypt from 2001 to 2005. He also held the title of Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs […]