Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
We need peace in the Middle East, not just process
By Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter For nearly two decades, there have been peace processes in the Middle East but no peace. In recent visits to the region including Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory we have heard a consistent message: people want peace, but are skeptic about the process and have little faith in the …
New wave nationalism
By Dominique Moisi PARIS: Could the world be on the verge of a new period of re-ordering itself, similar to the one experienced nearly 20 years ago? In the 1990s, the fall of the Soviet empire and the brutal implosion of Yugoslavia led to a spectacular increase in the number of independent states. To follow the …
Turkey-Israel: searching for a magic formula
By Soli Ozel The deadly forest fire on Mount Carmel presented a timely opportunity for the Turkish and Israeli governments to climb down from their crisis mode and look for an opening to start the normalization of their relations. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan swiftly decided to send two firefighting aircraft to Israel as his “humanitarian …
Disaster Politics
By Peter Lagerquist Among organizations and people who make emergency relief their business, it has long been a truism that natural disasters are in the final analysis not nature-made. Nature throws up problems; a lack of preparedness turns these problems into disasters. Occasionally, this connection works itself into national media narratives. In the US, in 2005, …
Abu Dhabi: Green ambitions
By Oxford Business Group While Abu Dhabi is introducing a series of green initiatives, like other rapidly developing cities it faces challenges in reducing its carbon footprint over the short term. For the municipality this means turning Abu Dhabi into a location rich in green areas that are increasingly nourished by recycled water. “Sustainability is the …
The US-China dialogue of the deaf
By George Soros NEW YORK: In 2010, economic conflict between the United States and China became one of the most worrying global developments. The US pressed China to revalue the renminbi, while China blamed the US Federal Reserve policy of “quantitative easing” for currency-market turmoil. The two sides are talking past each other, though both are …
Europe’s financial alchemy
By Luigi Zingales CHICAGO: It is universally recognized that a key factor underlying the 2007-2008 financial crisis was the diffusion of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), the infamous special-purpose vehicles that transformed lower-rated debt into highly rated debt. As these structures lost popularity on Wall Street, however, they gained popularity on the other side of the Atlantic. …
The making of international monetary reform
By Jean Pisani-Ferry BRUSSELS: If French President Nicolas Sarkozy had written the prologue to his presidency of the G-20, which has just commenced, he could not have done better. The run-up to the G-20’s summit in Seoul was marred by a series of currency controversies, bringing international monetary reform to the fore. Whereas French intentions to …
Four myths that hold back progress in fighting climate change
By Kenneth Chomitz and Vinod Thomas The UN Secretary-General has presented options for raising $100 billion a year to promote development while fighting climate change. This is timely, but for such funds to make a difference, we must get past a set of myths that prevent the efficient use of resources. Myth no. 1: Energy efficiency …
YEAREND SPECIAL: What lies ahead in 2011?
By Joseph Stiglitz NEW YORK: The global economy ends 2010 more divided than it was at the beginning of the year. On one side, emerging-market countries like India, China, and the Southeast Asian economies, are experiencing robust growth. On the other side, Europe and the United States face stagnation — indeed, a Japanese-style malaise — and …
YEAREND SPECIAL: A good year for God
By Chris Patten LONDON: It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the essayist Christopher Hitchens, and others, believers have hit back. Best of all has been The Case for God by the brilliant religion writer Karen Armstrong. More important still is the news …
A confederal solution for Palestine
By Robert Skidelsky LONDON: Last month, while in New York City, I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. To accommodate his security needs, the hotel had been converted into a fortress, much like Israel itself. Netanyahu was in the United States for yet another round of Middle East …
Thinking the unthinkable in Europe
By Dani Rodrik CAMBRIDGE: When Greece was bailed out by a joint eurozone-IMF rescue package back in May, it was clear that the deal had bought only a temporary respite. Now the other shoe has dropped. With Ireland’s troubles threatening to spill over to Portugal, Spain, and even Italy, it is time to rethink the viability …
Alternatives to austerity
By Joseph Stiglitz NEW YORK: In the aftermath of the Great Recession, countries have been left with unprecedented peacetime deficits and increasing anxieties about their growing national debts. In many countries, this is leading to a new round of austerity — policies that will almost surely lead to weaker national and global economies and a marked …
The dissident and the Mahatma
By Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI: With the Nobel Peace Prize presented this month in the absence of this year’s laureate, the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, it might be wise to think of a man who never won the prize: Mahatma Gandhi. Despite that omission, there is no doubting Gandhiji’s worldwide significance — including for …
A desert storm
By Tamer Alaa El-Din You who are in power have only the means that money produces. We, who are in expectation, have those which devotion prompts. A devotion that may fall occasionally yet is often violently feared. July 23, 1952 marked the beginning of an end. Egyptian militia controlled the cities of Fustat, Memphis, Alexandria, and …
Qatar: 77 million ton giant
By John Defterios While the football world and all its fans were rightly focussed on Qatar 2022 — a story kept on the boil by FIFA President Sepp Blatter — the tiny Gulf state announced a big milestone for the natural resource that made it famous, natural gas. 77 million metric tons may not trigger alarm …
A dismal failure of leadership all around
By Alon Ben-Meir NEW YORK: It is hard to describe the state of affairs of the Arab-Israeli conflict at this particular juncture without using adjectives such as “sad,” “unfortunate” or even “tragic,” which I think is the most appropriate description. The collapse of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process is indicative not only of the failure of …
The protocols of Rupert Murdoch
By Jonathan Schell NEW YORK: Whenever I hear people on America’s Republican right call themselves “conservative,” I experience the mental equivalent of a slight electric shock. A conservative is someone who, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke, believes that the established order deserves respect, even reverence. A liberal, by contrast, is someone …
Europe’s time to learn
By Harold James PRINCETON: Crises are a chance to learn. For the past 200 years, with the exception of the Great Depression, major financial crises originated in poor and unstable countries, which then needed major policy adjustments. Today’s crisis started in rich industrial countries — not only with sub-prime mortgages in the United States, but also …
The frontiers of power
By Malavika Jain Bambawale SINGAPORE: There are close to 1.5 billion people in the world without access to electricity, more than half in the Asia Pacific region. Unfortunately, in today’s world it is almost impossible to find viable income-generating activities without access to electricity. Renewable energy technologies (RETs) are invaluable to those who live outside the …
Is there a future for Haiti?
By César Chelala NEW YORK: Like many, I ask myself if there is a future for Haiti, and what shape that future would have. Unlike those who look with despair at the difficulties that country is facing, I believe that this country’s natural and human resources should be the base for a strong new society, one …
China’s monetary sterilization
By Fan Gang BEIJING: Not long after the United States Federal Reserve Board announced its second round of “quantitative easing” (known as QE2), the People’s Bank of China (PBC), China’s central bank, announced two increases of 0.5 percentage points in the required reserve ratio (RRR) of bank deposits. The RRR now stands at 18.5 percent, a …
Avanti Dilettanti!
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: Returning to Europe lately after a six-day trip to the United States, I wondered for the first time while reading the press on the recent Irish crisis whether the euro — and thus the European Union — might possibly fail. This could happen because, in the long run, the EU won’t be …
Morocco: Positive tale for retail
By Oxford Business Group Morocco’s retail sector is set to undergo a major shift in the coming years as large-scale purpose-built retail areas become more prevalent but moves away from traditional small-scale shops to massive retail malls may be slowed by incremental growth in consumer spending. The retail sector is a major contributor to the economy, …
Iran’s supreme power struggle
By Mehdi Khalaji WASHINGTON, DC: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never been happy about the status of the Iranian presidency — neither during his own tenure, from 1981-1989, nor during the terms of his three successors. Tension between the president and the Supreme Leader is built into the Islamic Republic’s core. The Supreme Leader …
Seeing REDD on climate change
By George Soros CANCÚN: The official communiqué from the Cancún climate-change conference cannot disguise the fact that there will be no successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires at the end of 2012. Japan, among others, has withdrawn its support for efforts simply to extend the Kyoto treaty. This sounds like bad news, because it …
The non-smoking gun
By Jorge Castañeda MEXICO CITY: Everyone these days, it seems, has their own favorite American diplomatic cable — or will soon — given that the 250,000 documents obtained by WikiLeaks include references to almost every country in the world. For Latin America, Wikileaks has so far provided enticing tidbits of both gossip and substance about Brazil …
Europe’s myopic defense cuts
By Uffe Ellemann-Jensen COPENHAGEN: All over Europe, budgets are being pared as a new age of austerity takes hold. Defense expenditures are proving to be the easiest of targets. Even Britain under the Tory David Cameron has joined the rush to slash defense spending. These cuts are coming at a time when European efforts to shoulder …
Editorial: Towards an Ivory Coast scenario
By Rania Al Malky The world has been watching in amazement as two men claimed a right to the top job in a fellow African country, the conflict-plagued Ivory Coast. Clashes have broken out between armed police loyal to the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and supporters of his rival Alassane Ouattara, who both claim to have won …