Column Archive

In late January, Ethiopia withdrew its last soldiers from Somalia after more than two years of bloody occupation and insurgency. Their departure immediately catalyzed a dramatic chain of events. The Transitional Federal Government (TFG) that had been backed by Ethiopia, the U.S. and the U.N. fled to Djibouti and, in apparent desperation, signed a peace deal with an alliance of moderate Islamists. As part of the deal, the TFG welcomed hundreds of alliance representatives into a newly-expanded parliament. The African Union declared the peace deal a “paradigm shift that gives Somalis a chance for lasting peace and reconciliation.” The enlarged […]

When the Chinese first learned that two Russian coast guard ships had sunk a Chinese-owned freighter on Feb. 15 in the Pacific Ocean, the incident must have aroused conflicting feelings regarding their sometimes overbearing neighbor. The freighter, the New Star, was registered with Sierra Leone and was using that country’s flag of convenience. The Hong Kong-based J-Rui Lucky Shipping Company owned the vessel. Ten of the 16 crew members were Chinese citizens, while six were from Indonesia, including the captain. Of the eight who died when the ship sank 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the port of Nakhodka, seven were […]

The war looks eerily familiar: beheadings, assassinations of police and public officials, terrorized businesspeople, extorted schoolteachers, and in five years more than 230 American civilians dead in the crossfire. All this could easily describe the battle in Afghanistan or Pakistan, but the reality is closer to home, where an increasingly gruesome and threatening war is threatening to boil over the United States’ southern border with Mexico. Summing up decades of policy, three former Latin American heads of state last week declared, “The war on drugs has failed.” Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of […]