Foreign Affairs – Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ superb chronicle of 300 years of Anglo-French rivalry reveals how the love-hate relationship between France and the United Kingdom has left an indelible mark on today’s world.
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Foreign Affairs – Americans are increasingly frustrated with Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts, but the United States should resist the urge to threaten President Pervez Musharraf or demand a quick democratic transition. Getting Islamabad to play a more effective role in the war on terrorism will require that Washington strike a careful balance: pushing for political reform but without jeopardizing the military’s core interests.
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Esquire – A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military’s new frontier outpost, by Thomas P.M. Barnett.
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American Enterprise Institute – Yegor Gaidar, Russian economist and market reformer, former acting Prime Minister of Russia, former Russian economic minister, and possible Putin poisoning victim, has written a book about the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 1980’s that has been extracted into this astonishing paper.
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Washington Post – Ahmed Rashid analyses the current situation in Pakistan.
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Foreign Affairs – Depending on whom you ask, Tariq Ramadan is either a brave Muslim moderate or an apologist for terrorism. Either way, his new book, which rethinks the Prophet Muhammad’s life for the modern world, is a step in the right direction.
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Foreign Affairs – Little-known heroes of the Holocaust were the rare diplomats who defied their superiors’ orders and issued visas to save lives. With Iraqis now scrambling to leave their own country, those examples are as relevant today as ever.
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Foreign Affairs – By rushing into Iraq instead of finishing off the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Washington has unwittingly helped its enemies: al Qaeda has more bases, more partners, and more followers today than it did on the eve of 9/11. Now the group is working to set up networks in the Middle East and Africa — and may even try to lure the United States into a war with Iran. Washington must focus on attacking al Qaeda’s leaders and ideas and altering the local conditions in which they thrive.
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Washington Post – The creation of the Defense Department Africa Command, with responsibilities to promote security and government stability in the region, has heightened concerns among African countries and in the U.S. government over the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

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Los Angeles Times – Niall Ferguson documents how the Soviet Union is being recreated.
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Foreign Affairs – Global financial instability has sparked a surge in “monetary nationalism” — the idea that countries must make and control their own currencies. But globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous combination, a cause of financial crises and geopolitical tension. The world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.
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Foreign Affairs – The rift between U.S. military and civilian leaders did not start with George W. Bush, but his administration’s meddling and disregard for military expertise have made it worse. The new defense secretary must restore a division of labor that gives soldiers authority over tactics and civilians authority over strategy — or risk discrediting civilian control of the military even further.
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Foreign Affairs – Thanks to high oil prices and hefty subsidies, corn-based ethanol is now all the rage in the United States. But it takes so much supply to keep ethanol production going that the price of corn — and those of other food staples — is shooting up around the world. To stop this trend, and prevent even more people from going hungry, Washington must conserve more and diversify ethanol’s production inputs.
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Esquire – A special, in-depth examination of a post-Bush world by Thomas P.M. Barnett, covering the good, the bad, and the unknown.
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Foreign Affairs – Kenneth Pyle’s new book argues that a resurgence of Japan’s power and purpose has Tokyo poised to play a bigger role on the international stage. Pyle is right, and it is a good thing for Washington and Asian security.
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Foreign Affairs – Margaret MacMillan’s engaging narrative history shows how Nixon’s trip to visit Mao helped end the Cold War. But neither leader anticipated how fast China would rise or how that rise would force the U.S.-Chinese relationship to evolve.
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BBC – The U.S. military is increasingly focused on a potential national security threat: climate change.

Washington Post – Military Sharpens Focus on Climate Change.

Read the full report: Center for Naval Analyses – National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.
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New York Times Magazine – Thomas Friedman describes what America needs to regain its global stature – Environmental leadership. A fascinating, thoughtful peace on a possible strategy for winning The Long War.
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Foreign Affairs – Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration’s grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts.
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Foreign Affairs – To tame the growing power of Iran, Washington must eschew military options, the prospect of conditional talks, and attempts to contain the regime. Instead, it should adopt a new policy of dÈtente. By offering the pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations with the United States, it could help them sideline the radicals and tip Iran’s internal balance of power in their favor.
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Foreign Affairs – The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one — and that Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little it can do to avert bloodshed now.
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New York Times Magazine – Who will be ruling Russia next year? And what of the democracy that will decide that?
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New Yorker – Why are Vladimir Putinís opponents dying? An insightful look into the state of politics and government in Russia today.
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Foreign Affairs – Thanks to a recent extraordinary rise in public and private giving, today more money is being directed toward the world’s poor and sick than ever before. But unless these efforts start tackling public health in general instead of narrow, disease-specific problems — and unless the brain drain from the developing world can be stopped — poor countries could be pushed even further into trouble, in yet another tale of well-intended foreign meddling gone awry.
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Foreign Affairs – Much of the already voluminous commentary on the war on terrorism centers on the question of whether it is a war at all. Here is an analysis of three books that are willing to stipulate, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that it is. They differ dramatically, however, over what tactics this war allows and, more broadly, what it means for governing within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.
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