Mostrando resultados por Editor "Foreign Affairs" en Todas las categorías

Western pundits and nostalgic Muslim thinkers alike have built up a narrative of the caliphate as an enduring institution, central to Islam and Islamic thought between the seventh and 20th centuries. In fact, the caliphate is a political or religious idea whose relevance has waxed and waned according to circumstance.

The mood of much of the world is grim these days. Turmoil in the Middle East, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees; random terrorist attacks across the globe; geopolitical tensions in eastern Europe and Asia; the end of the commodity supercycle; slowing growth in China; and economic stagnation in many countries - all have combined to feed a deep pessimism about the present and, worse, the future.

Over the last few decades, governments have increasingly sought to reclaim indigenous artifacts from museums abroad. Yet inappropriate calls for repatriation should be resisted. Encyclopedic museums do more than house artifacts; they also spread cosmopolitan ideas.

Much ink has been spilled on the collapse of European social democracy. Much less talked about, but just as brutal, has been the decline of German conservatism.

Brexit has exposed the contradictions between the unionist and nationalist gambles in Northern Ireland.

Since the Catalan independence crisis of October 2017, Spain has experienced a resurgence of nationalism.

In 2017, as crucial elections loom across Europe, the EU will no longer be able to defer hard questions about the migrant crisis. It will test the European project’s liberal values and the EU’s commitment to the international system for protecting refugees that many of its member states have championed for more than half a century.

In present-day China, hundreds of millions of people are turning to faith for answers they cannot find elsewhere in their radically secular society. This burst of religious activity poses risks for the Chinese Communist Party and as Beijing pursues a new, harder line on social change, striking the delicate balance between toleration and repression may become harder.

When it rains, it pours. As the Great Recession, eurozone crisis, stalled trade deals, increased conflict between Russia and the West, electoral revolts against European political elites, and finally Brexit followed the 2008 financial meltdown, it seemed clear that globalization was running out of steam. Yet few expected that its opponents would claim the top prize—the White House—and so soon.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s unprecedented repression of peaceful and nonviolent opposition has created a fertile environment for extremists and radical ideologies. The longer Egypt’s government maintains its repressive policies, the more radicalized and violent its Islamists will become.

Many in Israel and beyond remain convinced that the traditional model of the Middle East peace process has come very close to success in recent decades. But the model of change embodied in the Oslo Accords failed, and if tried again, it will fail again. Only a fundamentally different approach to change—call it bottom-up rather than top-down—can end the underlying conflict.

In April, I laid a wreath at the Manila American Cemetery, in the Philippines, where some 17,000 Americans are buried. Looking up at the mosaic maps of battles whose names still echo throughout the US Department of Defense - Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, and more - it is hard not to appreciate the essential role that the US military has long played in the Asia-Pacific. Many of the individuals buried in the cemetery helped win World War II.

On June 2, three North Korean restaurant workers who fled from their jobs in China arrived in South Korea. In April, another 13 restaurant workers made a similar escape. The workers were part of a North Korean initiative to earn cash for the regime when aid from the Soviet Union dried up and a massive famine struck in the 1990s. The regime continues to send its citizens to work overseas and bring in revenue for the state.

Over the past three millennia, China has made three attempts to project its economic pow-er westward. The first began in the second century BC, during the Han dynasty, when China’s imperial rulers developed the ancient Silk Road to trade with the far-off residents of Central Asia and the Mediterranean basin; the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of European maritime trading eventually rendered that route obsolete.

When Hillary Clinton’s career as a lawyer first drew media attention during the 1992 presidential campaign of her husband, Bill Clinton, she mused that she could have skipped law practice to stay at home and bake cookies. The comment led to a now-famous cookie bake-off between Clinton and Barbara Bush, which the upstart Arkansas governor’s wife handily won.

The problem with Washington's planning obsession.

Despite all the grim predictions, the European Union is not on the verge of collapse. Quite the contrary: If European leaders act with resolve and persistence, the union could experience a rebirth.

Contrary to popular belief, the reunification of North Korea and South Korea would not spell disaster for South Korea, nor would it pose an unacceptable risk for the United States, China, and Japan. Rather, it would produce massiveeconomic and social benefits for the peninsula and the region.

Latin America's new regional groups claim to share lofty goals, from resolving conflicts to coordinating political and economic policies. But there is little reason to believe that they are capable of achieving them.

Racial tensions have been at the center of American political debate recently, but the story of racial and ethnic division is actually a global one. So for the March/April issue, we did a deep dive into racial issues in comparative and historical perspective.