This week’s horrible news out of Afghanistan—NATO personnel shot inside the Interior Ministry, bombs going off and riots all over the country following reports of Korans being burned by US soldiers—brings doubts about President Obama’s carefully chosen Afghan strategy to a head. The murders in the Interior Ministry were a shocking display of incapacity and […]

Thank goodness those evil Republicans were defeated in 2008; otherwise White House funded snoops would be keeping innocent Muslims under surveillance.Oh wait — what’s this?  “White House Helps Pay For NYPD Muslim Surveillance:” It turns out the Obama administration has been forking over chunks of money to the NYPD that did exactly that — almost […]

A World Bank report prepared with lots of input from Chinese researchers and blessed with high level Chinese government support is calling for fundamental changes in the country’s growth model, reports the AP.In particular the report calls for a shift away from large state owned enterprises to private firms if the economy is to continue […]

During my five years as Hungarian Ambassador in Washington, DC, we used public communications extensively—both traditional tools and “outside the box” ones. Every day my staff and I were on the lookout for new outlets to portray our country in a positive light.In that vein, my two appearances on the Colbert Report were, without doubt, […]

We received the following letter from the State Secretary for Government Communication, Dr. Zoltán Kovács, on February 10, responding to Francis Fukuyama’s February 6 post, “What’s Wrong with Hungary?“The text of the letter follows: Budapest, 10 February, 2012 Dear Professor Fukuyama, Thank you for your response; your admission of the factual mistakes in your original post […]

The BBC ran a somewhat rambling and anecdotal article which nevertheless illustrates that linguistically at least, China’s hegemony in East Asia is not a done deal. Though many of the people interviewed in the article acknowledge that speaking Mandarin proficiently is crucial for taking advantage of the ever-expanding opportunities to do business in China, parents […]

Turkish reporting on foreign affairs this week centered on the heavily anticipated visit of Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping. A guest of President Abdullah Gül, Xi received head-of-state honors to recognize his coming ascension to the presidency of China, with the press uniformly reveling in the significance of his choice to include Turkey in his […]

Everybody thinks it; now somebody has said it.Hans-Peter Friedrich is the interior minister of Germany, and he has publicly stated that it would be better for all concerned if Greece just left the eurozone. It would certainly have been better if the Greeks (and the Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Irish) had never joined, and it […]

This week, we looked for the key to what comes after the Blue social model: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. As a society, we’re likely to return to our roots as entrepreneurs in the future, in contrast to the employee role Americans have settled into since the decline of the family-owned farm.On the home front, the Dodd-Frank […]

The U.S. has an unlikely new ally in its call for regime change in Syria: Hamas. The Times reports on this important turn of events: Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, said during Friday Prayer, “I salute all people of the Arab Spring, or Islamic winter, and I salute the Syrian people who seek […]