Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
Japan’s resilience lessons
By Margareta Wahlström NEW YORK: Buried in the coverage of last year’s Great East Japan Earthquake is a success story of which the world should not lose sight, because it tells us much about how we manage risk in the 21st century. It is the story of how the Japanese people, through centuries of memory …
Carbon emissions’ friendly skies
By José Maria Figueres SAN JOSÉ: It was once said of the battle to fight climate change that there is no silver bullet — there is only silver buckshot. But, while political leaders have been loaded for bear when it comes to many industries, they have thus far been unable or unwilling to take aim at …
What’s wrong with transformational leadership?
By Joseph Nye CAMBRIDGE: This year’s presidential campaign in the United States has been marked by calls from Barack Obama’s would-be Republican challengers for a radical transformation of American foreign policy. Campaigns are always more extreme than the eventual reality, but countries should be wary of calls for transformational change. Things do not always work out …
The age of authoritarian democracy
By Sergei Karaganov MOSCOW: The world is currently being shaken by tectonic changes almost too numerous to count: the ongoing economic crisis is accelerating the degradation of international governance and supranational institutions, and both are occurring alongside a massive shift of economic and political power to Asia. Less than a quarter-century after Francis Fukuyama declared “the …
‘Reel’ freedom in East Jerusalem
By Khaled Diab JERUSALEM: In East Jerusalem, the occupation has affected the city’s cultural landscape. Chronic underinvestment, expanding settlements and a massive wall — which Israel says it has constructed for security purposes and Palestinians allege is a land grab — have had the effect of squeezing the life out of the Palestinian quarter in Jerusalem …
Holy Land tours a new tool in peacebuilding
By Aziz Abu Sarah and Talia Salem JERUSALEM: Shira Nesher, an Israeli, stands alongside Fakhira Halloun, a Palestinian, as Nesher tells her story about life in a conflict zone to a group of American university students who are hanging onto her every word. “My family members are Holocaust survivors, and as an Israeli I grew up …
Beyond Fukushima
By Yukiya Amano VIENNA: Nuclear power has become safer since the devastating accident one year ago at Fukushima, Japan. It will become safer still in the coming years, provided that governments, plant operators, and regulators do not drop their guard. The accident at Fukushima resulted from an earthquake and tsunami of unprecedented severity. But, as the …
Why Egypt needs a coalition government
By Mustafa Abdelhalim CAIRO: Recently, Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt have repeatedly made calls for a new coalition government, which would represent all parties in parliament. Can Egypt benefit by adopting the concept of coalition rule? The answer, I believe, is yes. Building a coalition simply means inviting parties who would be in opposition to each …
Greece’s soft budgets in hard times
By Daniel Gros BRUSSELS: The first de facto default of a country classified as “developed” has now taken place, with private international creditors “voluntarily” accepting a “haircut” of more than 50 percent on their claims on the Greek government. As a result, Greece now owes very little to private foreign creditors. Greece also agreed to even …
Pakistan’s first Oscar
By Beena Sarwar BOSTON, Massachusetts: Pakistan’s online community erupted in virtual cheers as Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy received an Academy Award (or Oscar) recently in Hollywood for co-directing the Best Documentary (Short Subject). A Tweet by Pakistani blogger Anthony Permal summed up the feelings of many of his compatriots: “A woman from Pakistan, who made a film …
A devaluation option for Southern Europe
By Emmanuel Farhi, Gita Gopinath and Oleg Itskhoki CAMBRIDGE: This year is likely to mark a make-or-break ordeal for the euro. The eurozone’s survival demands a credible solution to its long-running sovereign-debt crisis, which in turn requires addressing the two macroeconomic imbalances — external and fiscal — which are at the heart of that crisis. The …
On Women’s Day, remember our Arab sisters
By Amat Al Alim Alsoswa Arab women have fought bravely over the last year to demand dignity and new freedoms. And their courage has been noted: In December, my Yemeni sister Tawakkol Karman became the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, in recognition of her principled democratic activism. But launching transitions was …
Alexander Hamilton’s Eurozone tour
By Harold James PRINCETON: Europe’s debt crisis has piqued Europeans’ interest in American precedents for federal finance. For many, Alexander Hamilton has become a contemporary hero. Perhaps one day his face should appear on the €10 banknote. Specifically, for European states groaning under unbearable debt burdens, Hamilton’s negotiation in 1790 of the new federal government’s assumption …
Burma’s turn
By Joseph E. Stiglitz YANGON: Here in Myanmar (Burma), where political change has been numbingly slow for a half-century, a new leadership is trying to embrace rapid transition from within. The government has freed political prisoners, held elections (with more on the way), begun economic reform, and is intensively courting foreign investment. Understandably, the international community, …
Turkey’s nation of faiths
By Bülent Arınç ANKARA: After decades of official neglect and mistrust, Turkey has taken several steps to ensure the rights of the country’s non-Muslim religious minorities, and thus to guarantee that the rule of law is applied equally for all Turkish citizens, regardless of individuals’ religion, ethnicity, or language. Turkey’s religious minorities include Greek Orthodox, Armenian, …
Did America blink?
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind — Julius Caesar. No sooner had the deal been done and the keys to freedom handed to …
Syria’s agony
By Shlomo Ben Ami MADRID: The English author and priest William Ralph Inge once said that “A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.” Syria’s Assad dynasty, however, seems to believe that it can defy that dictum. Historically, few autocrats have understood that change produced peacefully by government is …
The usual suspect
By J. Bradford DeLong BERKELEY: Across the Euro-Atlantic world, recovery from the recession of 2008-2009 remains sluggish and halting, turning what was readily curable cyclical unemployment into structural unemployment. And what was a brief hiccup in the process of capital accumulation has turned into a prolonged investment shortfall, which means a lower capital stock and a …
Japan’s revenge of the mandarins
By Masahiro Matsumura OSAKA: Ever since the huge earthquake that hit Japan’s Pacific coast at Tohoku on March 11, 2011, the country’s mass media has obsessively focused on the magnitude of the physical damage and the loss of life. Repeated broadcasts of traumatic video images of the great tsunami and the damaged nuclear reactors at the …
Seeking a new horizon for Palestinian prisoners
By Shawqi Issa The thorny issue of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails has numerous angles. First, it is a humanitarian cause. Many of the prisoners have spent decades, some more than 30 years in jail, with all the resulting social and economic ramifications for Palestinian society as a whole. Additionally, Palestinian leaders bear the moral …
The sustainability mindset
By Michael Spence MILAN: Markets and capitalist incentives have great strengths in promoting economic efficiency, growth, and innovation. And, as Ben Friedman of Harvard University argued persuasively in his 2006 book “The Moral Consequences of Growth”, economic growth is good for open and democratic societies. But markets and capitalist incentives have clear weaknesses in ensuring stability, …
Europe’s empty fiscal compact
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: The driving force of Europe’s economic policy is the “European project” of political integration. That goal is reflected in the European Union’s current focus on creating a “fiscal compact,” which would constitutionalize member states’ commitment to supposedly inviolable deficit ceilings. Unfortunately, the compact is likely to be another example of Europe’s subordination …
Egypt forex reserves drop slows to $636 mln in February
CAIRO: Egypt’s net foreign reserves fell by $636 million in February, the central bank said on its website on Sunday, marking a sign cant slowdown from the sharp decreases of the previous four months. Reserves declined to $15.72 billion at the end of February from $16.35 billion at the end of January. Since October, reserves …
Fanning the flames of justice in Syria
By David Scheffer CHICAGO: Justice will be a long time coming in Syria, but it can begin with a Security Council referral of the situation in that wounded country to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation and, ultimately, prosecution. The obstacles are serious, but the goal is imperative. This week, United Nations High Commissioner for …
American Dervish: A conversation about love, identity and faith
By Naazish YarKhan CHICAGO, Illinois: Ayad Akhtar’s “American Dervish,” set in pre–9/11 American suburbia, is a bold debut novel, where the author seems to hold the American Muslim community by the collar, and shake it into recognizing its failings — whether they are anti-Semitism, the unwillingness to accept that Muslims come in various shades or the …
Merkel’s next crisis
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: With Europe bogged down by the financial crisis and its national governments failing or being voted out of office across the continent, Germany has looked like an island of prosperity and stability. Chancellor Angela Merkel has appeared to be the embodiment of the new strength of old Europe’s problem child, a country …
New York police can do better for Muslim students
By Altaf Husain WASHINGTON, DC: The Associated Press discovery that the New York Police Department (NYPD) monitored Muslim college students both within and outside the city limits in 2006 and 2007 has sparked outrage from university officials and students. The surveillance included Baruch College, Columbia University, New York University and the State University of New York …
When technophobia becomes toxic
By Henry I. Miller STANFORD: During the late 1990s, a singular phenomenon appeared in countries around the world. One after another, food and beverage companies capitulated to activists opposed to a promising new technology: the genetic engineering of plants to produce ingredients. They are still capitulating to this day. The Japanese brewer Kirin and the Danish …
Can Europe be saved?
By Alfred Gusenbauer VIENNA: In 2011, Europe’s financial and banking crisis escalated into a sovereign-debt crisis. A problem that began in Greece ended up raising doubts about the very viability of the euro — and even of the European Union itself. A year later, those fundamental doubts remain undiminished. But, if one compares the EU with …
A Muslim chaplain who matters for non-Muslims, too
By Noah J. Silverman NEW YORK: In 1924, Norman De Nosaquo, a Jewish student at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a letter to the editor of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle in which he observed, “It is only through organized groups [that one can] accomplish anything of good for the advancement of the knowledge of the Jewish …