Domestic Politics Archive

BEIJING — An emerging consensus holds that domestic price bubbles and the high degree of nonperforming loans littered throughout China’s financial system represent imminent threats to China’s continued economic rise. However, doomsday evocations of a Chinese crash ignore the fact that, if and when a day of reckoning arrives, China may be able to use its sovereign wealth to engineer a soft landing, thereby avoiding the more-apocalyptic scenarios often predicted. Indeed, a controlled bust may even yield benefits by moderating subsequent growth, and many analysts remain bullish on China’s long-term fundamentals. This market sentiment has been buoyed by recent evidence […]

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq — Just a quick tour of the markets in any Kurdish city in northern Iraq is all that is needed to illustrate how far relations with Turkey, the once-hostile neighbor to the north, have come. Supermarket shelves are packed with Turkish goods, while new malls are flooded with Turkish brands. And many of the major business contracts, from airports to roads, go to Turkish companies. Turkey threatened Iraqi Kurdistan with an extensive military offensive just a couple of years ago, but the invasion that did occur was of a completely different nature. “I have to say that the […]

Great powers are sometimes molded by events as much as, if not more than, by grand strategy. In 1898, the United States — at the time an isolationist and anti-colonial power — entered onto the world stage after Spain allegedly sank the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The commercial adventures of the East India Company compelled the British state to intervene in China, sparking the Opium Wars, while in 1850, the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, ordered the British navy into the Aegean in order to protect a British subject, Don Pacifico, and reclaim his lost property. All were defining […]

Historians will eventually gain a fuller understanding of the forces that propelled the 2011 Arab Rebellion and of the changes that made decades of pent-up anti-government rage explode at precisely this moment. But just two months into the still-spreading uprising, we already know some of the important factors motivating protesters. We have also seen the range of responses the protests have elicited from the various Middle Eastern governments facing mass calls for the end of their entrenched regimes. What we have learned so far suggests that the revolution, like a wildfire on wind-whipped dry brush, will continue to spread. And […]

In Islamabad gunmen have shot dead Pakistan’s Minister for Minorities. Shabaz Bhatti, the only Christian in the government cabinet, was murdered on Wednesday in the gun attack on his car. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the killing, calling Bhatti a blasphemer. He had been calling for changes to the country’s blasphemy law under which anyone who speaks ill of Islam can face the death penalty.

It has become conventional wisdom among U.S. and European policymakers that the Muslim Brotherhood, with its superior organizational structure, will dominate any quickly held election in a post-Mubarak Egypt. Invariably, observations to this effect are followed by warnings about the movement’s beliefs and its questionable commitment to democracy. Those warnings took on ominous overtones when the Brotherhood announced Feb. 21 that it will establish the Freedom and Justice Party to participate in future elections. Many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s policy positions are indeed odious to Western sensibilities. In a democratic Egypt, however, the Brotherhood’s ideas may garner popular appeal. The […]

Fighter jets, aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, a no-fly zone over Libya and arming the rebels are all options being weighed up by the United States and its allies in the European Union, as a defiant Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is continuing to cling onto power and is ordering airstrikes on towns and arms depots.

Last week’s nationwide protests by Bolivian bus drivers were the latest in a series of demonstrations that have become a massive administrative and political headache for Bolivian President Evo Morales. Bolivians have developed a growing list of grievances against the beleaguered leader and are taking them to the streets — as well as to the mines and railways — across the country with greater frequency in 2011. Since winning re-election by a landslide in December 2009, Morales has been under mounting pressure from both ends of the spectrum of Bolivian society — the wealthier elites in the east and the […]

With the Russian government having assumed an increasingly aggressive posture regarding the country’s territorial dispute with Japan in recent months, the question naturally arises, Why? Senior Russian leaders, including President Dmitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, have broken with precedent and visited what the Russians call the Southern Kurils and what the Japanese label their Northern Territories. The Russian government has also announced plans to enhance the islands’ socio-economic development and defenses. The escalating crisis led the counselor for European Affairs at the Japanese Foreign Ministry to characterize the Russian-Japanese relationship last week as being at its lowest point […]

With the aftershocks of the global financial crisis continuing to rumble, leaders of the world’s major economies have struggled to define a meaningful role for the G-20. Meanwhile, the European Union has been pushed to the limit in efforts to address a gathering debt crisis among members of the eurozone. And the threat of a currency war has strained relations and tested the role of the dollar as global reserve currency. In this special report, World Politics Review considers global finance through articles published in the past year. Below are links to each article in this special report, which subscribers […]