E-Notes

One hundred years ago tonight, Sir Halford John Mackinder presented his paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History” (published in the April 1904 Geographical Journal) to London’s Royal Geographical Society. He argued that the “closed heartland of Euro-Asia” was the...

Identify the following country: a mid-sized non-European country with a history going back to Biblical events. An ancient trading center, it figured in the works of ancient historians. It has an almost exclusively Muslim population, a troubled colonial history,...

There are two certainties at this time of writing: (1) our armed forces will maintain a significant presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future and (2) the threat from al Qaeda and similar aligned groups will not be going...

Earlier this year, FPRI convened a conference to assess Asia’s shifting strategic landscape. Participants addressed long-term trends that have transformed the strategic environment in Asia, including the rise of China as an economic and military power, Japan’s protracted reconsideration...

The term “second nuclear age” is rarely used with precision or consistency. Sometimes it is intended to emphasize the “new” problems of nuclear proliferation. But many of these problems, such as deterrence, are not really new at all: they...

Gerald Posner’s recent book Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 has been widely hailed as an insightful analysis of our inability to prevent the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Reading Mr. Posner’s book and the press reports about it,...

On August 14, 2003, at just after 4:00 p.m., the power went off for over 50 million U.S. and Canadian citizens. Their homes, businesses, trains, elevators, refrigerators, air conditioners— all those myriad electrically driven motors, appliances, and gadgets— went...

Before turning to observations about the Korean conflict on the fiftieth anniversary of its Armistice, I should like to make two observations. The first focuses briefly on how our contemporary policies with respect to North Korea should be conducted....

On June 29, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a new report stating that the US is dangerously underfunding emergency response capabilities that will be needed after a future terrorist attack. According to task force chair Senator Warren Rudman,...