News Abroad

China as Number One? Don’t Bet Your Bottom Dollar

by Tom Engelhardt

China's Religious Problem

by Thomas David DuBois

Understanding Post-Mubarak Egypt

by Daniel Pipes

As Egypt lurches into a new era, a look at its complexities and subtleties helps to understand the country's likely course. Some thoughts on key issues:

An Arab Spring for Women

by Shahin and Juan Cole

The “Arab Spring” has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests. 

Washington on the Rocks

by Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S.

The Coming Palestinian Diplomatic Revolution

by Guy Laron

The clouds of smoke wafting over Libya, the gunshots heard in Syria’s main cities and the continuing unrest in Egypt and Bahrain, block from view one of the most momentous developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict.  After many years in which the Palestinians have tried intermittently bilateral talks with Israel and armed rebellion, they are now mastering the art of diplomacy.

A Right Royal Wedding

by Charles Carlton

This Friday perhaps a billion people across the globe will watch the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middletown.  Why?

The History of Families New and Long Lost: An American Compares Coat of Arms with Kate Middleton’s

by Pearl Duncan

Americans are following the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William for many details—the wedding dress, the hats the guest will wear, the couple’s romance and the pageantry of the royal event.  I am following the wedding with great curiosity, because I couldn’t wait to see the coat of arms Kate Middleton, whose family didn’t already have one, would be granted. 

Judging What’s Vital—The Problems of Measuring Progress in Unconventional Wars

by Gregory A. Daddis

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark

by Tom Engelhardt

This can’t end well.But then, how often do empires end well, really?  They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out.  Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.

Mohammed Bouazizi, Historical Figure

by Daniel Pipes

The self-immolation on Dec. 17, 2010 of an obscure Tunisian, Mohammed Bouazizi, set off a political firestorm across the Middle East that has yet to subside. His story as first told contained some inaccuracies; so now, with facts and his legacy more established, it's useful to review how the regional upheaval began.

The Man Who Continues to Speak about Experiencing the H-Bomb -- Exposed Clearly: the Deception that is Deterrence

by Oe Kenzaburo

Translated with an introduction by Richard H. MinearThe current disaster in Japan, the worst since World War II, may bring major change in Japanese thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. But the preconditions for that re-thinking existed long before the disaster. In the March 28 issue of the New Yorker, Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō published an essay, “History Repeats.” It reads in part:

To the Shores of (and Skies Above) Tripoli

by Andrew J. Bacevich

It is a commonplace of American politics: when the moving van pulls up to the White House on Inauguration Day, it delivers not only a closetful of

Ai Weiwei and the “Age of Madness”

by Lionel M. Jensen

It only took a little over four days after Ai Weiwei’s sudden apprehension by China’s Public Security Bureau at the Beijing Airport, for the government to initiate, as is its tireless and terrifying custom, the public process of building a “case” against the disappeared by alluding to the subject’s “crimes.”Owing to comments made last Wednesday and Thursday in three of the Chinese Communist Party’s growing number of online and print

Ai Weiwei and Qingming: An Appeal to China

by Lionel M. Jensen

Ai Weiwei (as most readers of this blog should now know), perhaps China’s best-known artist and provocateur, is missing. Like so many other people of conscience and voice in the past two years, he is gone. Swallowed by the insatiable fear of the state’s authoritarian belly. It has been more than five days since his apprehension and his wife, Lu Qing, who was also detained and questioned has yet to hear from him; he is unreachable by phone because it was turned off by the police when he

Iran’s New Mahdism Da`wah Video: Letting Slip the Jinns of Jihad?

by Timothy R. Furnish

Recently the Islamic Republic of Iran put out a video entitled"The Coming Is Upon Us," wherein current events and personalities are explicated in terms of their alleged relevance to the arrival of the Mahdi, the"rightly-guided one" in Islam who will make the entire world Muslim. In Sunni doctrine, the true Mahdi has not yet appeared on Earth (despite the pro

The Atomic Bomb and "Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy"

by Yuki Tanaka

The devastating 9.0 earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, together with the following massive tsunami, completely destroyed the picturesque northeast coast of Japan's main island, taking potentially tens of thousands of lives and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Along this stretch of utter destruction sit four nuclear power stations, comprising a total of 15 reactors, within a distance of about 200 kilometers. Of these, the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station, op

“Long Since Passed the Level of Three Mile Island” – The Fukushima Crisis in Comparative Perspective

by Asia-Pacific Journal

As the crisis in Fukushima grows more serious (see reports here, here, and here), international scientific organizations have begun painting an increasingly dire picture of radiation releases from the plant.  The

Reports from Tohoku: Assessing Death, Dislocation, and Flight of the Victims Back

by Matthew Penney

LATEST UPDATE 3.30 (Japan Time) -- The extent of the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan has shocked the world. An official report on the 20th listed over 8277 dead and 12722 missing – a great majority in the hardest hit areas of northern Japan. The “dead” are the number of the bodies found by police and rescue workers. The “missing” are those reported missing by friends and family. W

Irradiated Zone: Don’t Go There!

by Tom Engelhardt

“Seldom more than thrice annually did any layman or stranger travel the old road that passed the abbey, in spite of the oasis which permitted that abbey’s existence and which would have made the monastery a natural inn for wayfarers if the road were not a road from nowhere, leading nowhere, in terms of the modes of travel in those times.  Perhaps, in earlier ages, the road had been a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso; south of the abb