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The election of Barack Obama as President means that he now joins President Dmitry Medvedev as the first post-baby boom leaders of their respective nations. Because the two leaders are so clearly of a new generation, they have the most opportunity to finally succeed in breaking the old patterns of distrust and disengagement between the United States and Russia.
The burst of diplomatic activity that the Middle East has witnessed in recent months frequently deviated from Washington's policy guidelines, underscoring the decline in American influence in the region.The new U.S. administration will need a new and more constructive approach to handling the various issues of the Middle East.
Asia once was regarded as the vanguard of a global wave of democratization that, over the past three decades, has swept through southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa as well. In recent years, however, Asia has witnessed a democracy backlash.
The success of "state capitalism" – a capitalist economy run with a high degree of state control – has made it a model for states across the developing world. Western powers may now be wondering whether their brand of capitalism will triumph after all.
Despite critics who claim that America’s power is fading fast, both presidential candidates know that the U.S. remains the key player on the international scene. Even in the throes of the financial crisis, America maintains unmatched economic and military power; and the challenges to U.S. power today are in fact no greater than challenges that the country has faced in past decades.
China's economy will remain strong despite the current global financial crisis, but its leaders should not assume that the crisis is a failure of capitalism, concluded Albert Keidel in a speech before the U.S.-China Business Council last week. Both the United States and China can learn from the crisis to improve their political and economic systems.
As world leaders prepare for next month’s international financial summit, critics remain skeptical about how quickly the IMF and the World Bank can actually adapt to the 21st century. Yet the mere fact that the upcoming summit will include leaders from the G20—rather than just the G7, as tradition would have it—suggests that the world is moving toward an unprecedented new financial order.
Nuclear disarmament is not an end in itself. Rather, it should be a means to global security. Some argue that nuclear deterrence provides the best form of security. But the fact that we worry so much about proliferation suggests awareness that deterrence in a complex multi-polar order is not fail-safe. The only long-term answer is to reduce the number of nuclear weapons to zero.
Today's financial crisis in America looks remarkably like the crisis that struck Japan 20 years ago, when a stock market meltdown exposed years of speculative lending, mostly dependent on real estate, and led to an economic collapse. The United States can take lessons from the Japanese experience as it attempts to engineer its own recovery.
In this phase of the financial crisis, struggling countries are looking to rising powers for help, rather than turning to the conditional aid traditionally offered by the IMF. This trend highlights the shifting global financial order and indicates that emerging powers will undoubtedly play a larger role as the international community attempts to define a new global financial system.
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