Asia

Right now is a great time to be an environmentalist in China--especially if you're a foreigner. The politicians here care, at last, about your issues.

Schwartz Fellow

Indonesia has had an extraordinarily good run. The Islamist terrorist attack that struck two international hotels in the heart of Jakarta won't change that. This was the first successful attack in the country since 2005. That attack followed the spectacular 2002 Bali bombing that killed or maimed hundreds of tourists, thus bringing what had been America's war on terrorism to Southeast Asia. The consensus is that Friday's attack was perpetrated by some of the bedraggled remnants of Jemaah Islamiyah, the local answer to al Qaeda.

“If you’re looking for ways to change the dynamic, there are other ways to do it,” said Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “Asia is all about face. What she’s done is to create a huge face problem ...

Some political observers see the world as divided into two hostile camps, a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the west. Many Americans tend to view Muslims as a monolith, our views having been burned into our perceptions by 11 September, the Iraq war and ongoing tensions in the Middle East. Yet in countries such as Malaysia - one of the larger Muslim countries in the world - a more hopeful future is discernible.

I hope with all my heart that most of what I am going to write in this article will prove mistaken. President Obama’s appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East peace process, and of Richard Holbrooke as special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (and de facto American broker for the Kashmir issue), are both in themselves very positive moves. The Bush administration’s neglect of these two conflicts was among its more disgraceful foreign-policy omissions. The appointment of such senior, respected and impressive

Over the last several weeks, the world has been focused on the fighting in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are ruled by an Islamist political movement committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Yet several thousand miles away, voters in Bangladesh, a nation of over 150 million, have rejected Islamism and nationalist extremism in an extraordinary election. How is it that Gaza commands the attention of the Western press while a country that has roughly one hundred times the population merits barely a cursory mention?… more