Global Archive

According to the United Nations, today marks the birth of the world’s 7 billionth person, an event sure to cause great angst among the many surviving Malthusians who still believe that humanity’s ingenuity and the planet’s resources are both finite. But thanks to globalization’s continued advance and the modernization it enables, roughly four-fifths of humans live in societies with falling birth rates and half live in societies featuring lower than replacement-rate fertility. So we now know that the trajectory of global population growth will proceed somewhat more slowly toward our eighth and ninth billions, and that we may never reach […]

Yangon police have halted a farmers’ protest against evictions — a test of the new civilian government’s commitment to reforms.

As part of a “big think” forecast project commissioned by an intelligence community sponsor, I’ve begun to think about the future geography of global security. As often with this kind of project, I find myself falling into list-making mode as I contemplate slides for the brief. So here are nine big structural issues that I think any such presentation must include – Regional integration in East Asia depends on an American security presence. Virtually every country in East Asia is realistically planning for eventual absorption into a regional economic scheme structured around behemoth China, while quietly scheming to balance that […]

An unfortunate legacy of America’s “sole superpower” status is the tendency to over-emphasize Washington’s agency in shaping the global environment and downplay the role of others. For instance, the Obama administration deserves a great deal of credit in changing the tone of the U.S.-Russia relationship. But also critical to the reset’s success were Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election, which took that country off the European geopolitical chessboard, and the ongoing instability in Pakistan, which made the Northern Distribution Network more vital to supplying the military mission in Afghanistan. It may sound like a truism, but it is one that U.S. policymakers […]

This report produced by the U.S. government-owned Voice of America takes a big-picture look at the future of two potentially promising sustainable energy solutions.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an important policy address on what she called “economic statecraft.” In it, she announced that the United States will update its foreign policy priorities to include economic considerations, arguing that doing so will strengthen both our standing abroad and our economy at home. Among other measures, Clinton said that the State Department will do more to help U.S. companies compete for opportunities in emerging markets, including advocating for them and working to level the playing field between private companies operating on market principles and state-owned companies pursuing strategic goals. Clinton is […]

Thirty years of globalization has propelled widespread economic growth across Southeast Asia. In recent decades, the number of people in the region living on less than $1.25 a day has dropped by half. Yet, these positive development trends are accompanied by a darker side of globalization: trafficking in drugs and small arms, piracy, human smuggling, the marketing of counterfeit goods and nuclear proliferation. The size and scope of these challenges threaten to undercut the remarkable gains of the past quarter-century. Preserving those gains will require collaboration between Southeast Asian governments, the identification of novel streams of security and development assistance […]

In her WPR column yesterday, Frida Ghitis noted that the global chessboard is being “reset” as countries re-examine longstanding partnerships and alliances, both formal and informal, in the face of broad geopolitical changes taking place today. “As a result,” wrote Ghitis, “the coming months and years will bring about a recasting of important strategic links, some of which have been part of the global landscape for decades.” The evidence of this transformation can be found across the Middle East and South Asia, as a result of the Arab uprisings, but also due to the Afghanistan War, which has strained U.S. […]

Last month I spent a couple of hours on the phone being interviewed for the next iteration of the National Intelligence Council’s global futures project. This one imagines the world in 2030, and the interview was part of the organization’s early polling process of experts around the world. I’ve participated similarly in previous iterations, and I’ve always found the NIC’s questions fascinating for how they reveal the group’s primary fears about the future. That’s not to say I dislike the NIC’s global projections, because I do. They tend to lack the alarmist hype of most future scenarios generated by the […]