Briefing Archive

The victory of Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou in Saturday’s presidential elections in Taiwan has been greeted with much behind-the-scenes rejoicing among Chinese and American policymakers. Chinese leaders likely worried that their harsh crackdown in Tibet could have sparked a backlash in Taiwan, decreasing support for Ma, who was seen as more open to cooperating with Beijing than his opponent, Frank Hsieh Chang-ting. Hsieh is a former prime minister who belongs to the same political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), as President Chen Shui-bian. Taiwan’s constitution had prohibited Chen from seeking a third consecutive four-year presidential term. Ma […]

TOKYO — With stock markets around the world in turmoil, a rapidly appreciating currency, millions of pension records lost and signs the Japanese economy is slowing, now hardly seems a propitious time to have a vacancy at the head of the central bank of the world’s second largest economy. Yet Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party of Japan apparently begs to differ. Last Wednesday, the opposition-dominated upper house of the Diet rejected the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s second nominee, Japan Bank of International Cooperation Gov. Koji Tanami, to replace outgoing Bank of Japan chief Toshihiko Fukui, whose term expired the same […]

U.N. URGES AFGHAN ACTION ON RIGHTS — United Nations officials are urging Afghanistan to address rampant human rights abuses and an accompanying culture of impunity for those who commit them. “At a minimum, there needs to be the space for a national dialogue that acknowledges the injustices and suffering that have occurred. The voices of victims need to be heard,” Norah Niland, chief human rights officer for the U.N.’s Afghan mission, said March 18. “Building an environment that is conducive to respect for human rights is fundamental to a peaceful and democratic society.” A top priority, U.N. officials said, is […]

Sometimes a comedy can break your heart. “The Band’s Visit,” a highly acclaimed Israeli movie now showing around the world, tells the story of a charming group of Egyptian musicians, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, who come to Israel to play at the opening of an Arab Cultural Center. A series of misunderstandings leaves the musicians — resplendent in their sky-blue uniforms — stranded in a tiny Israeli desert village. It is a sweet comedy of coexistence and shared humanity. The Israelis bring the Egyptians, dignified in their plight, into their homes. They get to know each other at the […]

SEOUL, South Korea — Reclusive North Korea this week announced its interest in continuing talks with the United States on its nuclear weapons program. Last week in Geneva, Washington’s envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, met for eight hours of negotiations aimed at getting the stalled Six Party talks moving again. “The two sides decided to continue direct discussions on ways to resolve problems in implementing the Oct. 3 agreement,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported. The Oct. 3 agreement, reached during the last formal round of the Six Party […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Although it has received scant coverage in the international press, the year-old rebellion in the northern half of Niger has exacted a tremendous cost in the West African nation in both human and economic terms. For starters, at least 50 government soldiers have been killed by the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ), the Tuareg-led group spearheading the rebellion. The MNJ also has captured more than 50 soldiers and, in January, they grabbed a regional governor during a daring raid on a northern town. The rebels have also been blamed for laying land mines throughout the northern […]

Last month, a remarkable transformation occurred in the controversial Nabucco gas pipeline project — or at any rate in the public perception of the project in the English-speaking world. As recently as last fall, in fact, there was barely any public perception of the Nabucco project in the English-speaking world because there was barely any coverage of the project in the English language media. (For a rare exception, see “Iran-Turkey Gas Deal Gives New Hope for EU Nabucco Pipeline” on World Politics Review.) In the central European press, on the other hand, the project was widely heralded as a crucial […]

KATMANDU, Nepal — The founder of modern Nepal, King Prithvi Narayan Shah, famously described the country as “a yam between two boulders” — China and India. Now, as the biggest protests in 20 years unfold in the Chinese-controlled Tibetan Autonomous Region, China appears to be leaning on Nepal to quash protests in Katmandu and to clear Everest during the Olympic torch rally in May. Nepal is home to at least 20,000 Tibetan refugees and each year a further 2,000-3,000 Tibetans make the dangerous journey across the Himalayas to Nepal, en route to the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama in Dharamasala, […]

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Since independence, Malaysia has been the kind of feeble democracy where elections have been held regularly, but where it is usually quite clear beforehand who will win — and win big. However, the latest vote, on March 8, surprised everyone, with the opposition gaining 37 percent of parliament’s 220 seats and winning control of five of the federation’s 13 states — namely Kelantan, Perak, Kedah, Penang and Selangor. After the previous election, held in 2004, the opposition controlled only Kelantan and had just 9 percent of the seats in parliament. Anwar Ibrahim, the de facto leader of […]

Today (March 19), Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili will meet with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. The two heads of state will make an appropriately supportive mutual statement, particularly since the visit will mark Saakashvili’s first visit to the United States since his reelection in January. Nevertheless, the display of close presidential ties may not prove sufficient to restore Saakashvili’s luster as the leading democrat in the Caucasus, ensure Georgia’s territorial integrity, or enable Georgia to enter NATO — the most immediate mutual foreign policy objective of the two governments. In early January 2008, Mikhail Saakashvili won […]

GOING FISHING IN MALTA AND SPAIN — This item must be prefaced with a reminder that in the 2004 U.S. presidential election 55.3 percent of Americans voted, and thatwas the highest voter turnout in a decade. In Europe, there were two general elections Sunday in which voter turnout was an issue. In Spain, the experts were predicting that the lower the turnout, the worse Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s chances of re-election would be. A low turnout was reckoned as anything below 70 percent. In the event, however, 74 percent of Spaniards did their civic duty, and Zapatero […]

The harsh words and hard feelings that chilled transatlantic relations in January, when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made the mistake of stating the obvious about NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, will not be on the agenda during NATO’s Bucharest Summit the first week of April. But the source of Gates’ frustration that, in his words, most of the allies “are not trained in counterinsurgency” or doing enough in Afghanistan, should dominate the agenda — and so should the solution. In many ways, NATO’s necessary but nettlesome mission in Afghanistan is a microcosm of its post-Cold War shortcomings: Every member recognizes […]

KAMPALA, Uganda — Earlier this month, 1,000 people from around the world gathered at a World Health Organization-sponsored forum here to discuss what’s increasingly being seen as a global crisis: the acute shortage of health care workers. The WHO estimates that more than four million health care workers are needed in the 57 countries it defines as grossly understaffed (fewer than 2.3 doctors, nurses and midwives per 100,000 people). Thirty-six of the 57 worst-hit countries are in Africa (Malawi has around 265 doctors for 12 million people; Zambia has about 650 for the same population). But when it comes to […]

The states parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention held two important meetings in 2007. First, national biological warfare experts met for several days in mid-August to exchange ideas about how best to counter this threat. Second, the states parties held their annual week-long gathering in December. Both of these sessions were remarkably non-confrontational as compared with previous years, suggesting that new political dynamics are now shaping the international politics of biological warfare and terrorism. The December 2006 Sixth Review Conference of the BTWC directed the member governments to focus on two main issues this year: (1) strengthening national […]

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is in trouble. The rising cost of high-tech jets and the people to fly and maintain them threatens to put the service “out of business,” in the words of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne. He said last fall that he was worried the military couldn’t buy enough planes, fast enough, to replace 30-year-old F-15s and 50-year-old tankers before they started falling out of the sky. Wynne’s statement proved eerily prescient: In November an Air Guard F-15 manufactured in 1980 disintegrated in mid-air, nearly killing the pilot and resulting in a prolonged grounding for most […]

On March 4, Azerbaijan’s breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh became a scene of one of the most controversial attacks there since a May 1994 ceasefire, which established a no war, no peace situation in the region. The conflict started in 1988, when the predominantly Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh stated its intention to secede from Azerbaijan. The resulting war caused severe casualties and massive population displacement on both sides. Azerbaijan lost control over the majority of Nagorno-Karabakh’s territory and the adjacent seven regions. Although the Nagorno-Karabakh republic currently enjoys de-facto independence, no country has recognized it as an independent entity. Despite decade-long […]

The recent decline in violence in Iraq is not synonymous with progress in the war on terror. Instead, the debate over the success of the Iraq surge strategy is a dangerous distraction from the “long, hard slog” that awaits us in the fight against violent extremism. Four-and-a-half years ago, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used that phrase to refer to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a notorious 2003 memo titled “Global War on Terror.” In that same internal dispatch, Rumsfeld also stated that “we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war […]