The latest threat facing Iran’s theocratic paradise? Water fights and squirt guns. As a story in the WSJ says, After heeding a call on Facebook, a group of nearly 800 young men and women were among those who showed up at the park…They chased strangers around a giant water fountain, screaming and laughing as they […]

Dear readers of Via Meadia: The American Interest has a new homepage! Take a look around.

South Africa’s political façade has begun to crack. Fissures within the ruling African National Congress party became more pronounced Tuesday, as violent demonstrations erupted in Johannesburg to protest a disciplinary hearing for Julius Malema. From Reuters: South Africa’s ruling ANC will hold the second day of a disciplinary hearing of youth leader Julius Malema at […]

Martin Wolf has an excellent analysis of the struggling global economy in today’s FT. He writes: What has the market turmoil of August been telling us? The answer, I suggest, is three big things: first, the debt-encumbered economies of the high-income countries remain extremely fragile; second, investors have next to no confidence in the ability of […]

An article in today’s FT describes another arena in the Asian Great Game: water. The writer is also the author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and as the article notes, China’s “construction of upstream dams on international rivers such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra or Amur shows China is increasingly bent on unilateral actions, impervious to the concerns […]

Nigeria’s sad summer of religious rampages got worse this week with reports that a group of Christian youth, apparently seeking revenge for earlier attacks, attacked Muslims during Ramadan in Nigeria’s “middle belt” city of Jos, with at least 20 dead. Jos has historically been a religious flashpoint but recently such incidents were mainly confined to […]

Nobody can accuse Business Insider political editor John Ellis of thinking small.  His latest plan for Barack Obama: merge the US and Canada.Via Meadia supports this concept 100% as have all red blooded Americans since 1776.  As Ellis lists them, the advantages are irresistible. What would a United States of North America (or the United […]

“And the king said, Bring me a sword.” German business leader Hans-Olaf Henkel offers a Solomonic solution for Europe’s terrifying debt crisis—cleave the Euro in two. Henkel’s plan would create a new currency for the northern eurozone countries that aren’t buckling under massive debt – the “neuro.” The reeling Latin countries would then be left […]

An interesting article from the Moscow Times by CSIS researcher Alejandro Sueldo analyzes the effect of Russia’s competition with China on its nuclear policy and its general world stance.  One of the most common mistakes Americans make in foreign relations is analyzing each country’s relationship with the US through an exclusively bilateral focus.  We ask […]

Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation (full disclosure: WRM is a founding board member of that organization), has an essay in Foreign Policy that shows how important the reported death of “al Qaeda number two” Atiyah abd al-Rahman al-Libi really was. As Fishman writes, “Atiyah was the node that connected” al Qaeda’s […]