ISTANBUL ― Talking with members of Congress at a gathering here last week was an education in the public’s wariness of new foreign entanglements ― especially in Syria. It was a reminder that the post-Iraq era is only beginning, and that it may limit America’s ability to exercise power for the next few years. The great advantage (and on occasion, disadvantage) of the House of Representatives is that its members are so close to their constituents. Most of them spend every nearly weekend back home

It was not long ago when I heard that Kim Jeong-hoon, former president of Bell Labs, had been offered a job in the new South Korean Cabinet. I later learned that he withdrew his candidacy and returned to the United States. After this experience, Kim contributed an article titled “A Return to South Korea, Thwarted by Nationalism” to the Washington Post, in which he advised his fellow Koreans to embrace diversity and use transnational resources to achieve a greater economy. In this article, Kim al

On his first foreign foray as China’s new president, Xi Jinping visited Russia and then Tanzania, two countries with which China has frosty relations at best.“China and Russia, as the biggest neighbors of each other, share many commonalities,” Xi declared in Moscow. But in truth the two nations carry on carefully crafted civility, and that’s all.“All of Africa is China’s friend,” Xi said in Dar es Salaam, Tazania. But many Africans say they hold a different view.“China takes our primary goods an

Can the world just take a long, deep breath about North Korea? This isn’t a trick question, but a plea for a moment of sobriety amid Kim Jong-un’s tantrums. Rather than obsess over his nuclear capabilities, the firepower of his adjectives or the amount of foam at his mouth, let’s consider what Kim is up to. After barely a year running the family business, the Kim Dynasty, the Swiss-educated 30-ish dictator still has a bunch of trigger-happy generals looking over his shoulder. He’s showing them h

NEW DELHI ― Competition for strategic natural resources ― including water, mineral ores, and fossil fuels ― has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. But now that competition has intensified, as it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the last three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.Asia is the world’s most res

NEW DELHI ― One of the more remarkable (though largely unremarked) developments in recent Indian politics has been the startling shift in the country’s discourse about capitalism. As in many developing countries, “self-reliance” and economic self-sufficiency were India’s national mantras after independence ― and, in India’s case, remained so for more than four decades. Whereas most Westerners axiomatically associate capitalism with freedom, India’s nationalists associated it with slavery. After

BERLIN ― The world’s task in addressing North Korea’s saber rattling is made no easier by the fact that it confronts an impoverished and effectively defeated country. On the contrary, it is in such circumstances that calm foresight is most necessary.The genius of the Habsburg Empire’s Prince Klemens von Metternich in framing a new international order after the Napoleonic Wars was that he did not push a defeated France into a corner. Although Metternich sought to deter any possible French resurge