Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.On the whole, this news is about as good as it gets: trillions […]

The good folk over at the Lowy Interpreter blog have released a short, five-minute primer on the rising tensions in the South China Sea:The video is narrated by Michael Wesley, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. As Wesley explains, the South China Sea “gets much less attention than other crisis points in the Taiwan […]

According to reports, militants from Boko Haram in Nigeria, as well as fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan, are swelling the ranks of AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) in Mali, which is fast becoming a base, training area, and arms depot for international terrorists: …residents and rebels in the north [of Mali] report an influx […]

When I was asked by the editors of the Financial Times to contribute to a series on the future of conservatism, I hesitated because it seemed to me that in both the US and Europe what was most needed was not a new form of conservatism but rather a reinvention of the left. For more […]

Assad’s assault on Aleppo started yesterday, with fighting in the Firdous district reported. The Financial Times describes the mood in the city: residents are largely cowering in fear, but some still have sympathies for Assad’s rule. Even supporters seem to acknowledge that the regime is brutal, but the chaos and retribution that could follow the […]

“Anand Shimpi is one of the most influential tech industry figures you’ve never heard of,” writes Reuters. Shimpi has vaulted from armchair tech pundit to one of the industry’s most sought-after opinion leaders, courted by IBM executives and respected by the public as a reliable tech reviewer. His website AnandTech.com gets 12 million unique visitors every […]

If a sense of rising power is stimulating a new strategic discussion in India, a pervading sense of decline is fueling the same kind of discussion in Japan.One one side of Japan’s discussion is a right-wing nationalist movement aimed at returning Japan to relevance, generally by putting up a hard front against an ascendant China. Reuters reports on a […]

India is beginning to think like a great power—or at least some Indians are trying to stimulate that kind of thinking. Here’s Sashi Tharoor, Indian MP: If this century has, in the famous phrase, made the world safe for democracy, the next challenge is to make a world safe for diversity. It is in India’s […]

Vali Nasr, a former WRM colleague at the CFR, has a very gloomy outlook on Syria. Check out the video of his remarks here.Nasr says: The rebels are not democrats—they’re too fractured. This is an uprising that is becoming increasingly bloody. It’s now essentially a sectarian war between a minority Alawite regime and its Christian and Kurdish […]

As if one lingering unratifiable treaty weren’t enough, the U.S. may be negotiating yet another. The BBC reports that a UN global arms treaty to limit the illegal sale and spread of weapons is running into opposition both in Washington and abroad: The US and Russia — among the world’s largest exporters of weapons — as well as […]