Foreign Policy

The conventional wisdom in Washington -- and the core of U.S. President Barack Obama's "Af-Pak" policy, which he announced in March -- is that Afghanistan is now the central front in the conflict formerly known as the war on terror. Pakistan is essential too, of course, and indeed, the thinking goes, you can't have a successful Afghanistan policy without a successful Pakistan policy. The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it gets the situation entirely backward: The real fight is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan,

On Sunday, more than 1,000 Uighurs clashed with police in the western Chinese city of Urumqi -- marking one of the country's bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent years.

This week, Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell met in New York with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to begin discussing a potential "compromise" regarding the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. Israel's continued settlement expansion has been at the top of America's Middle East agenda since Obama's Cairo speech in June, when he declared that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

The era of male dominance is coming to an end.

Seriously.

For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions… more

What will the world look like when the present emergency has passed? The safest prediction is that the post-crisis financial sector will be downsized and more heavily regulated, nationally and internationally. The financial sector as a whole, which peaked at 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States in 2006, may shrink as much as 50 percent in the aftermath of the emergency.

Since the global financial crisis began, one of the major surprises has been the continued resilience of the U.S. dollar - despite attacks on the "American-style capitalist model," financial sector weakness, and record U.S. government deficit spending. The dollar today represents almost two thirds of the world's official currency reserves. Its holders presumably believe that it will remain highly liquid, relatively stable in value, and supported by prudent economic policies by the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve.

Many see the global economic crisis as proof that we live in one world. But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries.

As states large and small struggle to cope with and find a way out of the current economic crisis, it is not too early to begin thinking about how the "Great Recession" will alter the world's politics. Countries that have the economic fundamentals and resilience to emerge relatively early from the crisis -- China, some Gulf states, Brazil, and India -- are also likely to emerge stronger politically.