Articles
Middle East
It is a peculiar and occasionally disastrous quality of US politics that a majority of Americans misunderstand a region that figures so highly in their cultural and spiritual consciousness. The Middle East is a complex place with millennia of history which, beyond what is etched in scripture, is discounted from Washington, DC to Main Street as obscure and unimportant. This Web site is for anyone with an earnest curiosity about Levantine and Persian Gulf culture, history, and politics as told largely by Middle Easterners. It is for those who would have their presumptions rigorously challenged rather than triumphantly reaffirmed.
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East Asia
The rise of East Asia, with China at its center, is the defining event of our era. It is a long and subtle process, one that evolves too slowly to be captured effectively on a few spools of videotape with sound-bite overlay. Deciphering the impact of Asia's transformation requires patience; appreciating it something even more demanding: empathy. An assertive China, for example, can be intimidating for anyone who has not appraised it through the dark glass of history. The first predicate of an intelligent China policy is the knowledge that there's little anyone can do to stop it - except for the Chinese themselves.
Global Affairs & Economics
It is a symptom of American power and influence that the landscape of international relations and commerce is segregated into different "schools." There are engagers, idealists, interventionists, internationalists, isolationists, and imperialists (the latter term being recently revived from the late 19th century). This makes for interesting parlor debate, a polemical conceit that only a superpower could indulge in. Other countries can only afford to engage the world in a clear-headed, sober-minded, realistic way - in the time-worn tradition of Talleyrand, Bismarck, and Metternich. This Web site is informed by the world as it is, not the way some in Washington would have it.