NEW HAVEN ― Until now, and with few exceptions, the West has nurtured two distinct communities of foreign-policy specialists: the development community and the democratic community. More often than not, they have had little or no connection with one another: development specialists dealt comfortably with dictatorships and democracies alike, believing that prosperity can best be created by concentr

NEW YORK ― It is impossible to hear about sexual or sex-crime scandals nowadays ― whether that involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn or those of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, or the half-dozen United States congressmen whose careers have ended in the past couple of years ― without considering how they were exposed. What does it mean to live in a socie

NEW YORK ― In almost every part of the world, long-festering problems can be solved through closer cooperation among neighboring countries. The European Union provides the best model for how neighbors that have long fought each other can come together for mutual benefit. Ironically, today’s decline in American global power may lead to more effective regional cooperation.This may seem an odd time t

WASHINGTON ― At the Pentagon, there’s a legal formula for intelligence operations that has come to be known as “Gates practice,” after its proponent, Defense Secretary Bob Gates. It basically argues that if the U.S. conducts a sensitive intelligence mission outside a war zone, the president should make the decision. That may seem like a no-brainer, but it wasn’t always the case. Early in the last

TOKYO ― Just before the fourth trilateral summit between Japan, China, and South Korea began on May 21, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan jointly visited the areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, offering encouragement to the disaster’s victims living in evacuation centers. Since the accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nu

PARIS ― Due to its dramatic nature as well as to the worldwide media attention it has generated, the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi has become a catastrophe that, in the minds of many, overshadows one of the most destructive tsunamis of recent centuries. It has shamed an entire industry and has pushed some countries into urgently adopting moratoria and others into demanding the outright dis