BRUSSELS ― The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 ― and much more than money is at stake.The debate over the next year will be s

We should be more discrete and modest when it comes to evaluating the popularity of Korean culture overseas.With the rise in popularity of Korean television dramas and movies across Asian countries, the headlines of our newspapers invariably proclaim, “Hallyu (the Korean Wave) has conquered Asia.” When our K-pop group singers succeeded in attracting a huge crowd in Paris and London, our media once

It’s a man’s world. That’s something, for better or worse, women in Asia can tell you. Japan and South Korea underutilize women with little regard for how it constrains growth. The Philippines sends all too many of them abroad as domestics to ship money home and support an inefficient economy. A preference for boys in India and elsewhere leads to elective abortion of female fetuses. Indonesia and

CAPE TOWN ― Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of

COPENHAGEN ― The European Commission recently unveiled long-awaited measures to bring neighboring countries in the Mediterranean and the former Soviet Union closer to Europe. On the same day, another department of the same commission presented proposals aimed at curbing visa-waiver programs for some non-European nationals. Few missed the irony of formulating two plans that pointed in opposite dire

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he would order a gradual troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. On a superficial level there is nothing surprising about this decision. Obama is simply implementing what he had promised the American people in 2009 when he agreed to honor Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. The surge was always going to be temporary, especially in view

BEIJING ― When the now 88-year-old Henry Kissinger sat down with Chairman Mao to discuss opening up China back in the 1970s, America was at the peak of its power. It surely never entered Kissinger’s mind at the time that less than half a century later, as the Communist Party of China confidently celebrates its 90th anniversary, he would be back in Beijing passing the baton of global leadership on