Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
AN ISRAELI VIEW: At best, 2012 will be a year of reassessment
By Yossi Alpher The year 2012 will almost certainly not witness any progress toward agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. We’ll be lucky if there is no serious backsliding in the form of violence or formal withdrawal from negotiating frameworks. Meanwhile, however, we can and should be making good use of this year to reassess the entire …
Charisma we can believe in
By Joseph Nye CAMBRIDGE: A leadership transition is scheduled in two major autocracies in 2012. Neither is likely to be a surprise. Xi Jinping is set to replace Hu Jintao as President in China, and, in Russia, Vladimir Putin has announced that he will reclaim the presidency from Dmitri Medvedev. Among the world’s democracies, political outcomes …
The Emperor’s new climate-change agreement
By Bjørn Lomborg COPENHAGEN: Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception. Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided …
Winners and losers in the Arab revolutions: Central Europe
By Matyas Eorsi We have more and more reasons to be skeptical about predictions of political analysts and even intelligence services. None of us could foresee that a socially-motivated suicide protest by a young Tunisian man, Mohammed Bouazizi, would be followed by public anger that brought down Tunisia’s brutal dictator. None of us could have seen …
Turkey’s balancing act
By Mohammed Ayoob EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN: Turkey has over the past few weeks become the spearhead of a joint Western-Arab-Turkish policy aimed at forcing President Bashar Al-Assad to cede power in Syria. This is quite a turnaround in Turkish policy, because over the past two years the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an had gone …
In Syria, what does Russia want?
By Hussain Abdul-Hussain Russian policy on Syria might seem planned and coherent, but a closer look shows that Moscow has no imagined end-game for Syria’s unrest, and is rather improvising its stances as events unfold. Moscow has a clear interest in the survival of the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, who is a major importer of …
Striking euro gold (and silver)
By Harold James PRINCETON: The alternatives for Europe’s currency, the euro, seem increasingly limited to a desperate muddling through or a chaotic collapse. But there is a bolder and more productive approach that relies on past experience with multiple currencies. The threat posed by Europe’s current policy impasse can hardly be overestimated. In the early 1930’s, …
China and the Arab Spring
By Kelley Currie There has been speculation that China’s authoritarians stood to benefit from the wave of revolutionary political change that swept across the Middle East and North Africa, but the reality has proven more complicated. While the Chinese leadership has moved quickly —sometimes clumsily, sometimes not — to exploit some of the openings created by …
The Arab revolutions: A view from Sahel
By Modibo Goita Arab revolutions have caused regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, violent uprisings in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, and demonstrations in Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. These dramatic recent events in the Arab world have generated speculation among experts regarding ramifications for the Arab world, Israel, Africa and NATO. I believe the winners thus …
South Korea’s political springtime
By Lee Byong-chul SEOUL: The ascension to power of the pudgy 29-year-old Kim Jong-un in North Korea has grabbed headlines around the world, but the most important story involving Korean young people and politics is taking place in the South. There, young voters are becoming angrier, more politically active, and increasingly hostile to the old established …
Europeanizing Europe
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: The eurozone is at the center of the global financial crisis, because only there, in the realm of the second most important currency after the dollar, does the crisis hit a weak “structure” rather than a state with real power. It is a structure that is squandering the trust of citizens and …
Egypt’s anti-Western future: Rhetoric or reality?
By Ron Gilran and Daniel Nisman Egypt continues to reel from the aftermath of the recent high profile raids against foreign-backed NGO’s by state security forces. Egyptian human rights watchdogs have condemned the raids as an effort by the SCAF to subdue the groups which are fomenting criticism against its policies, while ignoring the large amounts …
North Korea’s tears
By Ian Buruma HO CHI MINH CITY: Can an entire people go mad? Sometimes it certainly seems so. Images of North Koreans in their hundreds of thousands howling with grief over Kim Jong-il’s death suggest something very disturbing. But what? An exercise in mass delusion? A ritual of collective masochism? Kim was a brutal dictator, who …
The German hour
By Jean Pisani-Ferry BRUSSELS: A series of developments over the last few weeks have set in motion a downward spiral for the eurozone. Unless officials — especially German officials — act fast, the verdict of financial markets is bound to be ruthless. First, the eurozone has failed to turn the tide. Mario Draghi, President of the …
Schadenfreude capitalism
By Harold James PRINCETON: The protracted financial and economic crisis discredited first the American model of capitalism, and then the European version. Now it looks as if the Asian approach may take some knocks, too. Coming after the failure of state socialism, does this mean that there is no correct way of organizing an economy? In …
Peril or Promise in North Korea?
By Javier Solana MADRID: Two days after Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader, died in a train in his country, South Korean authorities still knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, American officials seemed at a loss, with the State Department at first merely acknowledging that press reports had mentioned his death. The South Korean and US intelligence services’ …
Europe is not the United States
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: Europe is now struggling with the inevitable adverse consequences of imposing a single currency on a very heterogeneous collection of countries. But the budget crisis in Greece and the risk of insolvency in Italy and Spain are just part of the problem caused by the single currency. The fragility of the major …
Macedonia’s man of peace
By Christopher Hill DENVER: Angelina Jolie’s new film, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” is about the ethnic tensions that produced the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II. The film has already won two awards and is an emerging box-office success, attesting to the enduring interest — and perhaps mystery — that the …
Egypt’s Salafi challenge
By Omar Ashour CAIRO: “We want democracy, but one constrained by God’s laws. Ruling without God’s laws is infidelity,” Yasser Burhami, the second leading figure in the Salafi Call Society (SCS) and its most charismatic leader, recently said. The unexpected rise of the Salafis in Egypt’s parliamentary election has fueled concern that the most populous Sunni …
The lasting damage of Iraq
By Shlomo Ben Ami MADRID: The folding of the American flag in Iraq amid a collapse of public security and a severe crisis in the country’s fragile political order seals a tragic chapter in the history of the United States. It marked the denouement of one of the clearest cases ever of the imperial overreach that …
India’s anti-corruption contest
By Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI: India ended 2011 amid political chaos, as the much-awaited “Lokpal Bill,” aimed at creating a strong, independent anti-corruption agency, collapsed amid a welter of recrimination in the parliament’s upper house, after having passed the lower house two days earlier. The episode, which leaves the bill in suspended animation until its possible …
The decline and fall of the Euro?
By Daniel Gros BRUSSELS: Great empires rarely succumb to outside attacks. But they often crumble under the weight of internal dissent. This vulnerability seems to apply to the eurozone as well. Key macroeconomic indicators do not suggest any problem for the eurozone as a whole. On the contrary, it has a balanced current account, which means …
COLUMN: Goldman’s sukuk: Is the criticism fair?
By Asim Khan Goldman Sachs’ maiden foray into capital-raising utilizing sharia-compliant mechanisms has understandably generated a lot of interest. However, as in the case of some other conventional banks before it, the market reception in certain quarters has been somewhat skeptical, mainly due to the misunderstanding surrounding the nature of the sukuk structure adopted and how …
A Russian spring?
By Dominique Moisi PARIS: Russia is not Egypt. And Moscow is not on the eve of revolution as Cairo was less than a year ago. Indeed, Russia’s powerful have at their disposal assets that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime lacked. As an energy superpower, Russia can open its coffers to appease, at least in part, …
Who will be the Republican presidential nominee to face Obama?
By Andrew Hammond The 2012 US election season begins on January 3 when Iowa becomes the first state to hold contests to decide who will be the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in November. While Barack Obama will be re-nominated as the Democratic contender, the Republican race’s outcome is more uncertain. Most recently, in November and …
The Middle East in 2011
By Ahmed Kadry CAIRO: As we near the end of 2011, you could be forgiven for taking a long deep breath and letting out 365 days of revolution, jubilation, turbulence, tragedy and uncertainty. It all started on January 1 when a terrorist bombing on Alexandria’s Saints Church tragically took the lives of 23 Egyptians. It was …
The streets of 2012
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent? The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are …
25 days to go
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: On Thursday, three things happened: The Cairo Criminal Court cleared five police officers of charges over the killing of five protesters in Sayeda Zeinab during the January uprising; prosecutors; civil and military police raided 17 offices affiliated with 10 local and international NGOs in Cairo and Giza on accusations of receiving …
Europe’s squandered minority
By Zeljko Jovanovic BUDAPEST: Today, millions of Europeans are afraid and frustrated as they face unemployment, loss of savings and pensions, radically reduced social benefits, and other economic hardships. Their fears are warranted, because the current financial crisis is undermining the very union that was established to heal Europe’s wounds at the end of World War …
The dollar’s long tail
By Sanjeev Sanyal NEW DELHI: The ongoing economic crisis and the persistent deficits of the United States have increasingly called into question the dollar’s role as the world’s anchor currency. Recent moves to internationalize China’s renminbi have led to anticipation of a looming shift in the global monetary system. Many prominent economists, including the members of …