E-Notes

President Barack Obama has now twice postponed carefully planned trips to Indonesia, a land of his childhood education. Health care legislation and oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico have been the causes: which suggests that big domestic preoccupations...

One of the most perceptive insights in the late Samuel Huntington’s much-misunderstood essay The Clash of Civilizations was its discussion of “torn countries,” those whose elites—as in Turkey today or early 1990s Mexico—face a stark choice between embracing or...

On March 3, masked gunmen surrounded the United States consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, departing the exterior perimeter after a fifteen minute standoff. Ten days later, in Ciudad Juárez, three U.S. consulate employees were assassinated. Days later, Robert Krentz, an...

In September 2007, the late Michael Radu wrote an important E-Note, titled “Struggle in the Sand Box:  Western Sahara and the ‘International Community’.”  He put the last two words in quotation marks because the struggle seemed to illustrate a...

China’s rise naturally raises concern among its neighbors about Beijing’s agenda. China has emphasized that its “rise” will be “peaceful,” but China also will seek to remove impediments to its rise, in part by invoking existing international rules, and...

The following account is based on a panel discussion FPRI co-sponsored with the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Center for East Asian Studies in May 2009 and follow-up discussions among several of the panel...

On January 25, 2010, FPRI held a conference, co-sponsored with the Reserve Officers Association, examining power in East Asia and shifts in its distribution and meaning. This report summarizes that conference. Video of the conference is available at /research/asia. ...

Most of us are aware of the many wonderful uses of the Global Positioning System (GPS) that allows us to pinpoint our location anywhere on the globe, often within just a few meters.  We find our way in our...

While the EU is as beset as ever by internal divisions, European elites’ ambitions for strengthening integration now revolve around greater foreign policy engagement and effectiveness. This is the central paradox of the Lisbon Treaty: an arrangement supposed to...

In August 2003, an electric grid failure led to a widespread blackout in the Northeastern US.  Within minutes of the event, Federal officials from both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were issuing statements assuring...