One of the most profound migrations in history is taking place today. Cities are swelling all over the world with the influx of farmers and peasants. But it is in China, the world’s most populous country, that this great migration has the potential to remake geopolitics. The numbers are staggering. There are 182 Chinese cities… Continue reading A Floating City of Peasants (Review)
The pictures from Abu Ghraib have achieved iconic status. The hooded man on the box, his arms outstretched, has superceded the image of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The Bush administration will forever be remembered as “the administration that tortured.” Iconic images have a concentrated power. The Abu Ghraib pictures convey, in visual shorthand,… Continue reading Art of Torture
[Daniel Heyman, “They Put me in an Animal Cage,” gouache on nishinoushi paper, 2008.] Daniel Heyman is a visual artist from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and words of Iraqi victims of torture from U.S. facilities like Abu Ghraib. Here he talks with Foreign Policy In Focus co-director John Feffer about how he… Continue reading Interview with Daniel Heyman
The breakfast that greeted me at my San Francisco hotel last week was bright, cheerful, and utterly appalling. The hotel management, with typical euphemism, called it a “continental breakfast.” But only the denizens of the great continent of sugar — which encompasses a large swath of America and some of its overseas dependencies — could… Continue reading Bittersweet Economy
A little over a decade after a terrifying genocide left a million people dead, Rwanda has recovered enough to become a tourist destination in central Africa. As veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer reports in his new book A Thousand Hills, Rwanda is an orderly, peaceful, and economically developing oasis in an otherwise strife-torn region. Kinzer points… Continue reading A Thousand Hills (Review)
Comedian Boris Johnson is now the mayor of London. Comic Beppe Grillo has emerged as an important political force in Italy. Here in the United States, comedian Al Franken has moved into the lead for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats according to one recent poll. Inadvertent comic Arnold Schwarzenegger is still the governor of California.… Continue reading What’s So Funny?
An army in retreat often destroys the land so that it can’t be used by the adversary. This scorched earth policy began in agricultural times when retreating armies burned the fields to deprive their opponents of food. Later, the militaries would level entire cities, as the Nazis did to Warsaw before they left it to… Continue reading Scorched-Earth Presidency
As part of our special investigation “Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide,” we asked a host of military thinkers to contribute their two cents on topics relating to global Pentagon strategy. (You can access the archive here.) The following dispatch comes from John Feffer, codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy… Continue reading Surrounding China’s String of Pearls
Behind every great economic bubble lies what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” Greenspan had in mind the tendency of people to pay more and more for the same thing: a tulip, real estate in the South Seas, a share in Widget.com, a one-bedroom apartment in downtown DC. This exuberance isn’t… Continue reading Of Coffee and Capitalism
When pundits talk about the U.S. elections and foreign policy, they focus on Iraq and Iran. But the third member of the infamous “axis of evil” may prove to be just as influential. In the last several weeks, North Korea has stopped dismantling its nuclear facilities and has even threatened to rebuild what it has… Continue reading Stealth Crisis