By Christopher Biggers, columnist for Asia Chronicle. While U.S. President Obama decides how to spend his waning political capital, the situation in Afghanistan collapses. Obama must choose one of two strategies: Deciding whether to conduct a counterinsurgency (COIN) with the proper force ratios or opting for a “light troop footprint.” Now is not the time [...]
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today praised President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap plans for a missile defense system in Europe and urged the U.S. to also cancel Cold War-era restrictions on trade with Russia. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the Western alliance and Russia should consider linking their defensive missile systems. He said NATO and [...]
Followers of competition policy had expected the next big antitrust news to come out of Washington. Sticklers to information technology regulation and weary of missing the ‘fraud’ boat, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has let it be known that it would be particularly more vigilant with regard to monitoring the field. Today, however, [...]
It looks like political showdown in Turkey, where the ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AKP, has taken a series of actions that will again antagonize the country’s secular establishment in general, and more specifically, the military. Ian Bremmer, esteemed author and President of the Eurasia Group, has recently written an [...]
Health-care activists have maintained that the system for granting patents on drugs consistantly denies the less fortunate access to essential medicines, discouraging pharmaceutical firms from collaborating to develop new ones for neglected diseases. Several initiatives announced this week, some which focus on collaboration and others on transparency may help remedy those long-standing problems. On the [...]
Hiroko Tabuchi, contributor to the New York Times, has below written about the competitive advantage Japan should have regarding the smartphone market. Indeed, Japanese makers thought they had positioned themselves to dominate the age of digital data. In the 1990s, they set a standard for the second-generation network that was rejected everywhere else. Carriers created fenced-in [...]
The end result of a failed state is hardly caused by chance, a simple misnomer, snake eyes when the dice are rolled. Corruption and mismanagement are usually the culprits of a nation engulfed in turmoil, with most opportunity for rebound squandered. Elizabeth Dickinson argues that its no coincidence that Zimbabwe’s anual GDP growth plummeted from [...]
The government of Taiwan has fallen in two out of six categories of governance, according to the Worldwide Governance Indicators report, released at the end of June. The annual report, commissioned by the World Bank, said that compared with its rankings last year Taiwan had fallen behind in the “Government Effectiveness” and “Voice and Accountability” [...]
It started with thunderous applause, applause for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, two Presidents who have combined governed arguably the most powerful nation on Earth for the last sixteen years. Bill Clinton began by speaking on his current work with the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Climate Initiative, noting how dramatically important [...]
Wanted to take this opportunity to note that Corporate Foreign Policy will be attending the TD Bank Financial Group forum featuring a moderated “conversation” between former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Bush and Clinton will appear together in Toronto on a public stage for the first time since Mr. Bush ended his presidency, in [...]
