China's accession to the World Trade Organization thrusts formidable challenges on Chinese leadership to honor promises relating to the country's rule of law developments. The United States and the international community should seize this unprecedented opportunity by directing more resources toward such reform efforts.
Major problems are delaying the otherwise successful collaboration between the U.S. and Russia to prevent the theft of poorly-secured weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and related materials, technologies and expertise in the former Soviet Union. Government failure to correct these problems threatens to leave vast stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons and biological agents vulnerable.
The United Nations Security Council has ordered inspectors back into Iraq with a
sweeping new mandate to search everything everywhere. The question is: can they
do the job? With the Security Council united and the credible threat of war should
Iraq obstruct inspections there is a good chance that they can-- but only if the
UN now gives the inspectors the resources they will need to disarm Saddam Hussein.
In many countries, tenets of the Washington Consensus -- privatization, trade liberalization and fiscal austerity -- have become politically noxious ideas. That is too bad. The consensus may be an impaired brand, but some of the ideas remain sound. The blanket repudiations of the Washington consensus in the early 2000s tend to be as superficial as their blanket acceptance a decade ago.
