June 2, 2017 As Pyongyang, Washington and other regional players prepare for the prospect of war, North Korea’s nuclear program and ballistic missile capabilities have received undue amounts of attention. Important though they may be, they have less bearing on how the war will be fought than does North Korea’s conventional military.
Eliminating Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities would be the first objective in a war, and indeed the justification for an attack. The second objective would be to protect South Korea from North Korean retaliation. No one really knows the true status of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, but a nuclear strike on a U.S. asset or ally is unlikely because it would force the U.S. to respond in kind, wiping out the North Korean regime.
May 26, 2017 Iran is more formidable on paper than perhaps it is in practice. It is the 17th-largest country in the world and the 17th-most populous. It is the sixth-largest producer of oil and the third-largest producer of natural gas. And, according to the International Monetary Fund, it boasts the world’s 29th-largest economy by gross domestic product despite decades of economic sanctions against it.
But the country is constrained by its demography. Iran has several large minority populations, including Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis, all of which have separatist tendencies. Since its founding in 1979, when it toppled the secular monarchy, the current regime has tried to solve this problem by cultivating a national identity steeped in Shiism. (The shared use of the Persian language has also helped in that regard. In fact, historically, it has influenced the cultures and civilizations of peoples in all the surrounding regions.)
But religion can go only so far. Its efforts have not exactly endeared the government to the Sunni minorities that populate Iran’s farther reaches. And the clerics who dominate the government are often at odds with the country’s republican institutions.
May 19, 2017 Over the past few decades, China has become famously prosperous, but it has some problems it needs to solve if it wants its prosperity to continue. Its wealth was built on trade, and its trade depends on maritime transportation. The United States, with its powerful navy, controls the seas and could theoretically blockade the sea lanes Beijing depends on.
So China is looking for overland trade routes. These routes could have the added benefit of helping to redistribute wealth to China’s otherwise impoverished interior provinces. First, however, China has to build the requisite infrastructure.
Enter Southeast Asia, the gateway to the Indian Ocean and a region that is ripe for the kind of infrastructure investment Beijing can provide. Perhaps no country in the region stands to gain more from Chinese investment than Myanmar.
May 12, 2017 In December 2016, Russia joined OPEC in a pledge to cut oil production by roughly 1.2 million barrels per day. And for the first quarter of 2017, OPEC largely made good on its pledge. It produced 1.1 million fewer barrels of oil per day in the first quarter of 2017 than it did in the final quarter of 2016.
May 5, 2017 The mounting debt owned by the U.S. government is as much a geopolitical question as a financial one. The federal government breaks its budget into three spending categories: mandatory, discretionary and net interest expense.
Mandatory spending includes pre-existing obligations. Discretionary spending requires passing legislation and is largely composed of defense spending. Net interest expense, which currently makes up about 6 percent of the federal budget, is expected to grow to nearly 12 percent in the next decade.
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the U.S. debt will have a blended average interest rate of approximately 3.4 percent in 2017. If interest rates exceed the CBO’s current projections, net interest expense would increase and discretionary spending – and therefore likely defense spending – would decline.
April 28, 2017 France held its first round of presidential elections last weekend. Since no single candidate garnered 50 percent of the vote, the contest continues next weekend with a runoff between the top two leading vote-getters: Emmanuel Macron of the newly formed En Marche movement and Marine Le Pen of the controversial National Front Party. The latest Ipsos polls show Macron leading Le Pen in the runoff by a margin of 62-38 percent, although other polls show Le Pen has gained momentum in the past week.
April 21, 2017 Building economic ties should be the major avenue for Turkey to develop inroads into the Balkans. Turkey is a European power as well as a Middle Eastern power, and it has been a key player in the Balkans for centuries. But Turkey’s influence in the Balkans and the rest of southern Europe is currently limited at best.
April 14, 2017 Salafism originated in the mid-18th century in an area that now encompasses Saudi Arabia. It can best be described as a tendency that envisions an austere form of Islam. This modern trend within Islam began as a corrective movement in 18th century Arabia to bring Muslims back to the religion’s original creed.
For many decades, the kingdom exported Salafism and associated ultraconservative ideas by constructing and purchasing mosques, underwriting seminaries, publishing literature, dispatching clerics, supporting charities and so on. Over time, however, it gradually lost control over the Salafist ideology itself, and three distinct branches formed: quietist, jihadist and electoral.
April 7, 2017 The world is currently in the midst of an exporters’ crisis. The stagnation in global consumption levels and decline of commodity prices has led to increased instability and insecurity in countries heavily dependent on exports.
The origins of the exporters’ crisis lie in the economic recessions that the United States and Europe experienced due to the 2008 financial crash. These countries were major consumers of Chinese goods, especially low-cost manufactured products. Lost revenue slowed China’s economy, resulting in lower Chinese demand for commodities and goods. This led to falling commodity prices and a decline in global exports.
March 31, 2017 Joining the European Union dramatically changed the structure of the United Kingdom’s economy because it had to respond to different market needs. Three sectors define the structure of the British economy. The primary sector includes activities related to natural resources; the secondary one includes all goods produced by the industrial sector; the tertiary sector includes services such as banking and finance.
In the first half of the 20th century, the primary sector was the core of the British economy while manufacturing spurred industrial growth. The role of both of these sectors in the British economy drastically declined after the U.K. gained access to the EU free trade area in the mid-1960s and became a member of the EU in 1973.
March 24, 2017 On March 11, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the most seats in Uttar Pradesh’s state legislative elections. This graphic shows the extent of the party’s victory.
Uttar Pradesh is one of the most important states in India. Modi believes he can use this state to increase his support because it is India’s most populous state with over 200 million people and also one of the poorest. For this reason, Modi and BJP’s promises to grow the Indian economy and share the wealth appealed to these voters.
March 17, 2017 What does it mean to be French? Inherent in this question is a fundamental tension within French nationalism that is unique to France. One aspect of French nationalism is that it views itself as a universal program. This is best embodied by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This nationalism views French ideas about “liberté, égalité, fraternité” as equally important to what it means to be French as speaking French and living on French soil. In this sense, anyone who adopts these principles can be French, and anyone who becomes a French citizen is heir to these principles.
French nationalism was based on the idea that the nation was of paramount importance and was defined by class and a set of ideas about how society ought to be structured. All of the various factions in the French Revolution believed they were unifying the nation, but each faction had to exclude certain groups from the nation in order to define the whole. This has morphed far beyond the original exclusion of the aristocracy and has been used to exclude immigrants to France. The question that the National Front is posing is whether Muslims can truly be assimilated as full members of the French state.
The Geopolitics of the American President