Donald Nuechterlein is a political scientist whose writing can be found in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In an article published today, he says that because of an assumption that the 2012 presidential election will focus on domestic issues, pundits and reporters are paying scant attention to where the candidates stand on foreign policy issues and the GOP candidates themselves largely content themselves to say...

WASHINGTON — It was gratifying to hear a despotic leader blame the United States for the rise of a democratic protest movement against his regime. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, wants his people to think that those who have taken to the streets to express their rage over rigged elections are nothing but tools of American foreign policy, put to work by none other than Secretary of State...

Souring U.S. Pakistan relations are now poised to get much worse: Pakistan is vowing to shoot down U.S. drones that it sees in its airspace: Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new directives, a senior Pakistani official told NBC News on Saturday. According to the new Pakistani defense policy, “Any object entering into our air space, including U.S. drones, will be treated...

Will the newly-launched Community of Latin American and Caribbean States end up displacing the Washington-based Organization of American States, as Venezuela President Hugo Chavez hopes, or will it fizzle out as so many previous attempts at Latin American unification have done? Columnist Nelson Ortega from Venezuela’s Aporrea is certain that the formation of CELAC is the culmination of Simon Bolivar’s...

Here is some economic history from Barry Ritholtz: We’ve known for literally thousands of years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this. We’ve known for 1,900 years that that rampant inequality destroys societies. We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse. We’ve known for hundreds of years that the...

UPDATE, Dec. 13: Bloomberg News reports that MVRDV, the Dutch architecture company that designed the much criticized “pixelated cloud” buildings may modify the design in the wake of the negative reactions. Bloomberg: “It may be difficult for the developer to go on with the current design after getting negative attention in the mass media,” Lee Sang Yun, a professor at Yonsei University’s department...

Are the once all-powerful credit-rating agencies, the most important of which are American – becoming irrelevant to the markets and those who invest in them? According to this editorial from Germany’s Financial Times Deutschland, despite the fact that Standard and Poor’s threatened to downgrade eurozone debt last week, European markets have hardly moved. The editorial board of the Financial...

Vladimir has gone back in time to the days of the Soviet Union. How else to explain the Russian prime minister’s assertion that the US and not people from his own country are behind the protests of vote tampering that have arisen since Russia’s recent parliamentary elections? Putin is increasingly going back to his happy place, where war was peace, reality was conveniently airbrushed out of existence,...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Manny Francisco, Manila, The Phillippines This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. (And Russia’s anti government protests grow...)

Could it be that part of America’s plan for the Iraqi invasion was to undermine the Iraqi family by luring women and girls to work for the occupation? For Oman’s Al Watan in an article reminiscent of the type of content we published at the height of the war, columnist Walid Al Zubaydi writes that the way U.S. immigration officers insult Iraqis granted asylum in the U.S. is a consequence of the...

Former House Speaker and current front-runner for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination Newt Gingrich has announced that if he’s elected he’d appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State, rather than someone who indulges in “appeasement” as he says Hillary Clinton is doing. Yes, it’s the same John Bolton who ran into trouble being confirmed as UN ambassador under George Bush...

Latest update from the BBC: The BBC reports that Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of the US drone that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border. Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged. Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground. [:] BBC security correspondent Frank...

Does the global “Occupy” movement reflect the very best of Western dedication to social and economic justice – or is it just a craven reflection of a civilization in moral decline? Columnist Iulian Leca of Romania’s Voxpublica writes that juxtaposing the mad rush for Black Friday shopping bargains against images of the protests exposes the ‘Occupiers’ as no better than the...

In “The Iraqi Phoenix Rises Again,” I described how the once proud and powerful Iraqi Air Force(IqAF) — at one time the sixth largest air force in the world — was decimated as a result of both the 1991 “Persian Gulf War” (Operation Desert Storm) and Saddam Hussein’s desperate concealing, disassembling and “stashing abroad” of its remaining aircraft before the 2003 U.S. invasion of...

Not since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War has the Middle East experienced such radical change. Dictators have fallen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen; Syria is suffering civil war; and rebellion is cooking in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait. But with several revolutions behind us, the question remains of whether the revolutions will result in democracy or radical Islamic...

It may be a long time before democracy comes to Russia. [I blog here.]

Jack Goldstone presents the case here that China, under current trends, cannot become the economic behemoth many expect it to be. And Russia’s growth has stagnated. But, he does see growth in the economies of Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico, as well as Brazil and India, the B and I of the BRIC formulation. He’s absolutely right, I think, that innovation doesn’t blossom in repressive environments....

HONG KONG — China has to find a way to continue its rapid growth without choking to death. Literally. When I landed in Beijing last week, the sky was a brownish miasma through which distant landmarks were only faintly visible. The moment I stepped outside the city’s vast international airport, I noticed an acrid hint of burning coal in the all-too-palpable air. The next day, when I went to...

Will the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the new organization that pointedly excludes the U.S. and Canada, prove to be more than a footnote of history? This news item from Venezuela’s El Universal, the first of a series of CELAC articles we are working on, covers the opening session of the event, which featured a speech by Venezuela President Hugo Chavez. Chavez implored his guests...

Calls for the legalization of drugs are coming from the strangest places these days – like from the president of the world’s leading cocaine exporter. Columnist Antonio Caballero of Colombia’s Semana writes that while he may be ‘the most submissive servant of the United States among world leaders,’ Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has done something not even Washington’s...

American citizens are celebrating in the streets as their government snatched final victory in the War on Terror on 1 Dec. 2011 — through a maneuver that used legislative brilliance rather than bullets. The moment of victory came when 61 senators passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2012 that allows the indefinite military detention on American soil of American citizens...

Disastrous Friendly Fire Event in Pakistan Could Grind the U.S. Afghan Campaign to a Halt by John C.K. Daly NATO recently literally shot itself in the foot, imperiling the resupply of International Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Afghanistan by shooting up two Pakistani border posts in a “hot pursuit’ raid. Given that roughly 100 fuel tanker trucks along with 200 other trucks loaded with NATO supplies...

As the global financial crisis has worsened, Europeans could only look on with envy as the United States continued to issue debt and successfully sell it – and at amazingly low interest rates. That’s because America has a central bank empowered to be the ‘lender of last resort,’ which means that if private investors don’t buy U.S. Treasury Bonds, the FED will. According to Ulrike...

Oh, Benny, Benny, Benny: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government unveils an ad campaign urging expats to come home, and some Jews in the U.S. find the message insulting. DETAILS HERE. It sounds like B. N. is making the same mistake people often do with groups: not all ethnic groups — not even his own — are monolithic. And some are offended when its assumed in a highly public way that they are.