Commentary

Of the United States’ $600 billion defense budget, at least 40-50 percent goes to technology. Technology issues are extremely important in national security, and I would like to give an overview of some of the major issues and a...

China’s legal encounter with the West began unhappily in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the close of the preceding century, the Qianlong emperor had dismissively informed an emissary from King George III that China had no...

In yet another display of madness, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his cronies have decided that if you lose the presidential election, simply do not announce the result and maybe everyone will go away. Mugabe and his party, Zanu-PF,...

No story in American history has captured the popular imagination better than that of Abraham Lincoln’s youth. A poor boy growing up in what was then a remote area, enduring the tragic death of his mother at an early...

The U.S. elections in November 2008 will bring new leadership and reconsideration of policies toward Asia. In China, the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership, which began its second and final five-year term in 2007–08, faces new leaders in its key...

I. A Horse of a Different Color? Democracy and Distrust in Taiwan Following a seventeen-point victory in Taiwan’s presidential election on March 22, 2008, Ma Ying-jeou took office on May 20 with an inaugural address that reiterated his priorities:...

Drug-related violence in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, the major portal for U.S.-Mexican commerce, left the city of 350,000 without a police chief until printing-shop owner Alejandro Domínguez Coello valiantly accepted the post on the morning of June...

Discussion of the United States’ relations with China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong can be framed as an issue of nationalism and national humiliation. Taiwan and Hong Kong are and have been crucial symbols of China’s emergence as a strong...

My book The Much Too Promised Land had a very strange origin in the sense that I really never intended to write it. I “resigned” from the State Department in January 2003. Only two secretaries of state in the...

Abstract: When individuals and populations of organisms face resource scarcity, they respond in various ways: by substituting other resources, by expanding or changing geographic range, or by finding ways to compete more successfully for the resources. Humans have also...