Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

In 1996, Ehud Barak, who was then Israel’s foreign minister and would later serve as prime minister, characterized Israel as “a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle.” Twenty years later, as political turmoil and violence engulf the Middle East, that harsh metaphor captures better than ever the way most Israelis see their country and its place in the region. Their standard of living has never been higher. Their country’s economy is robust, and Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit remains the envy of the world.

Fifty years ago this week, the Cultural Revolution began with a sudden shift in power. China’s youth, raised to revere their teachers and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres, were abruptly told to overthrow them instead. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong urged students to “bombard the headquarters,” smoking out crypto-capitalists and spies who had wormed their way into the party and betrayed the revolution. “To rebel,” the chairman assured the young, “is justified.”

How to marginalize the Islamic State online.

How should one judge a president’s handling of foreign policy?

The January/February 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs.

According to conventional wisdom, the deterioration of US-Israeli relations is the result of personal animosity between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama. But ill-will is more of a symptom than a cause. In fact, the increased friction reflects a new Israeli grand strategy. Rather than seeking to minimize differences with the United States over Iran and Palestine, as previous Israeli governments had done, Netanyahu has worked to diversify Israel's international partnerships, cultivating new friends - from India to China to Saudi Arabia - so that Israel is less dependent on the United States.

This May’s general election wins for British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party confounded opinion pollsters and surely surprised Cameron himself.

GB Road, New Delhi’s red-light district, is one of India’s largest, with an estimated 5,000 sex workers living in 96 brothels. It is also one of the nation’s oldest, having been established by the British in the 1930s.

When the anti-austerity party Syriza came to power in Greece in January 2015, Cornel Ban and I wrote in a Foreign Affairs article that, at some point, Europe was bound to face an Alexis Tsipras, the party’s leader and Greek prime minister, “because there’s only so long you can ask people to vote for impoverishment today based on promises of a better tomorrow that never arrives.”

Belief in “the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, is a characteristic American trait. But hope in a better future is not uniquely American, even if it has long been a more potent secular faith in the United States than elsewhere.

Riley Burke has it all: a successful advertising agency, a beautiful house, a trim sailboat, and a gorgeous wife. But no longer sure of his wife's love, he begins an affair, the first in their 10-year marriage. As Riley and his would-be lover wait on the dock in Newport Harbor for the launch to his boat, a young man nearby is attacked by a brutal thug. When Riley intervenes, he finds himself inextricably drawn into a chain of events that will change his life forever; he finds himself, suddenly, in dangerous waters.

The coming revolution in genetic engineering will be exciting to some, frightening to others, and challenging for all. If not adequately addressed, it will also likely lead to major conflict both within societies and globally.

Commercialization and globalization, coupled with a decline in U.S. Defense spending, have ushered in a new era for the U.S. Defense industry. The Pentagon is off to a slow start, however, in weathering the current transition.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, critics say postcommunist reforms have failed. But the evidence says otherwise. Transition states in Europe and Eurasia have become normal countries - no worse, and sometimes better, than other states at comparable levels of development.

Shinzo Abe is trying to restore Japanese consumer confidence by boosting inflation. But confidence must rest on something more substantive: meaningful structural reforms to reverse Japanese companies' lagging competitiveness. Otherwise, any temporary economic boost will soon give way to disillusion.

In Eyes of the Storm, Roksana Badruddoja explores the perceptions of second-generation South Asian-American women about daily social practices in the U.S. and how they view themselves in comparison to broader American society. She accomplishes this by engaging in a year-long feminist ethnography (in 2004) with a cross-national sample of twenty-five women in the U.S., spending a day in the life of each woman eating, drinking, and talking about work, partners, families, food, clothing, and how they feel about being children of immigrants, among other things. The research on which Eyes of the Storm is based explores the meaning of national belonging (and lack of belonging) for a group of "second-generation" South Asian women in America. Here, Badruddoja focuses on both the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migration, which includes the effects of population circulations and demographic change (community formation, segregation, and integration).

Set in middle America during the economic hard times of the Nixon era, this tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicles everything Andrew Whittaker - literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist - commits to paper over the course of four critical months. From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, we find our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, tormented by his ex-wife, and living on a diet of fried Spam, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort.

Even if a military intervention began well, U.S. forces would likely find themselves bogged down in the messy work of keeping the peace for years to come.

In 2017, as crucial elections loom across Europe, the EU will no longer be able to defer hard questions about the migrant crisis. It will test the European project’s liberal values and the EU’s commitment to the international system for protecting refugees that many of its member states have championed for more than half a century.

She looked familiar, but when he had known her before, her chest had been no bigger than his then-skinny pecs. Now, she could float a platoon of capsized Marines. “Mary!” he exclaimed raising his eyes from her…nametag. “So good to see you again.” Thank goodness she had not accidentally pinned herself, the explosion would have blown out the windows. She was still as ugly as sin. No implant could fix that..p>