NEW YORK: A prediction three months ago that popular protests would soon topple a dictatorship in Tunisia, sweep Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt, provoke civil war in Moammar Qaddafi's Libya, and rattle regimes from Morocco to Yemen would have (...)
NEW YORK: After watching the collapse of Lebanon's government last week, it is hard not to think about efforts to build a stable Iraq. The two countries have so much in common. Both are volatile democracies where any political question can provoke (...)
NEW YORK: As euro-zone leaders face growing uncertainty in financial markets about the public finances of Greece and other member countries, their statements, albeit somewhat vague, underscore a much larger story - one that will force firms and (...)
NEW YORK: In 2009, Forbes magazine named US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao the "world's most powerful people. In 2010, we will discover that neither has the power to keep US-Chinese relations on track. That is bad news for (...)
NEW YORK: Early this month, Kyrgyzstan's president Kurmanbek Bakiyev went cap in hand to Moscow to ask for financial aid. To make his request more palatable, Bakiyev announced that he was demanding that the United States close its airbase in (...)
How sick is Nigerian president Umaru Yar'Adua? In May, he admitted during a live television broadcast that he suffers from a kidney ailment, but sought to quell rumors that he was terminally ill by insisting that fears for his health are greatly (...)
Zimbabwe's election appears, once again, to confirm a truism: Africa only seems to make international headlines when disasters strike - a drought, a coup, a war, a genocide, or, as in the case of Robert Mugabe, grossly incompetent government. But, (...)
Just when the smoke from Turkey's domestic political conflicts of the past year had begun to clear, another deadly attack by Kurdish separatists on Turkish soldiers has the government threatening military attacks inside northern Iraq. That prospect (...)
It is said that political power in Pakistan flows from the three A's: Allah, the Army, and support from America. Of the three, it is the army leadership that has the clearest means of ridding the country of Pakistan's president in uniform, Pervez (...)
Despite his bellicose rhetoric, US President George W. Bush would very much like to avoid a choice between air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and accepting a nuclear Iran. For the moment, administration officials are hoping that "targeted (...)
Whatever critics at home and abroad may think, the "surge that President George W. Bush is planning for Iraq is more than a troop increase; it is a new and high-risk regional strategy. True, Bush's plan will prove far too little and comes far too (...)
Like North Korea, the Iranian government will not shy from a showdown over its nuclear program. Why should it? A nuclear weapon is the ultimate guarantee that the United States can never do to Iran what it did to Iraq. Moreover, this struggle with (...)
How will the post-11 September climate affect liberation movements and terrorist groups? Ian Bremmer* examines the dynamics of US-Russian relations, and their implications for Chechnya
US-Russian relations reached new levels of accord following the (...)