The fighting in Libya has reached a stalemate: Moammar Gadhafi has proved far more resilient than his adversaries anticipated, and he has also exposed the limits of what can be accomplished by war from afar. If NATO decides to end the standoff by attacking his forces with greater ferocity, there’s only one nation (you guessed it) with the requisite power.This much is evident. What remains unclear

The unhappy marriage of convenience between the United States and Pakistan survived another squabble last week.Pakistan threatened to halt CIA drone strikes against militants in its tribal areas, one of the only effective U.S. tools for hitting al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives based there. Pakistani officials then leaked their demand that Washington sharply reduce the number of CIA and special-forc

We all know that Democrats want to spend more on people and Republicans want to tax people less. But giving someone an extra dollar is no different than taking a dollar less from that person; raising spending is the same as cutting taxes, and cutting taxes is the same as raising spending.Gee, maybe Democrats are closet Republicans, and Republicans are closet Democrats.Of course some spending isn’t

The government has set down a policy outline for overcoming the power shortage this summer, which will be inevitable due to the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Under the outline, the government will invoke a relevant law, but there will be no planned rolling outages. Efforts to save power on the part of enterprises and households will be crucial.It is esti

Peru’s political system has been ailing for decades. Corruption, violence and deep economic inequalities have left it weakened. Now, the first round of voting in the presidential race, which took place Sunday, threatens to leave the country in critical condition.From a field of five candidates, two emerged as front-runners likely to move on to a runoff election June 5. Both appear wanting in exper

Timothy Geithner says borrowing more from China to finance tax cuts for the most affluent Americans would be irresponsible.The Treasury secretary has it backward. The real question is whether Beijing is willing to double down on a nation whose balance sheet makes Italy look good. Holding $1.2 trillion of U.S. debt is a fast-growing risk to China.Traders have a theory about why the euro is reasonab

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a fan of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, with important caveats. He supports most of the policies of the past three months in the turbulent Middle East, thinks the president has improved relations with the Europeans and the Russians, and believes the summit meeting in January between Obama and President Hu Jintao of China was a success. At the same time, he faults t

Can Burma have its cake and eat it too? The answer rests with ASEAN. Right after the new civilian government was installed at the end of March in Naypyidaw, one of the first important tasks President Thein Sein did was to submit a letter to the ASEAN Secretariat stating Burma’s readiness to take up the grouping’s chair in 2014.At the 11th summit meeting in Vientiane in November 2004, under pressur

Republicans jumped all over President Barack Obama’s budget speech at George Washington University as political, and they are absolutely right.It was the old Obama, the one who changed history in 2008, and he is back on his game, both thematically and tactically. The domestic debate now is much clearer and the takeaway for Republicans is out of a horror movie: Be afraid. Be very afraid.Obama was e

Many of the 30 million customers of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, or Nonghyup, suffered inconveniences for four days from Tuesday as the bank’s computer network broke down. It was the worst accident of its kind in Korea and fueled unease among the public over the security of online financial transactions as it came just several days after a serious hacking incident at Hyundai C