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Since July, at least 745 people have been killed and 8 million affected by monsoon rains and flooding across Southeast Asia. In response to the floods of the past week, a number of countries pledged assistance: U.S. Marines arrived in Bangkok last Saturday with equipment and sandbags; China has provided 64 rescue boats and water-purifying equipment; Japan has come forward with tents, blankets, mattresses and electricity generators.

Last April, M.I.T. held a business conference on campus titled “Africa 2.0: Achieving Growth Through Innovation.” In the keynote speech, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank, announced to a packed room, “Africa is now the new frontier.”

Greg Mortenson, the high-profile advocate of girls' education in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been forced to defend his best-selling book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time," against charges that key stories in it are false.

Mortenson shot to international fame with the book, which describes his getting lost in an effort to climb K2, the world's second-highest peak, being rescued by Pakistani villagers in the village of Korphe and vowing to return there to build a school for local girls.

A critique of the U.S. involvement in the military intervention in Libya that will no doubt be common in coming days is that the Obama administration is making a large error by embarking on a war with a third Muslim country, as if reversing Moammar Gadhafi's momentum against the rebels will be a rerun of the debacle of the war against Saddam Hussein.

A further element of this view is that -- whatever the outcome of the Libyan intervention -- the United States' standing in the Islamic world will once again be severely damaged by an attack on a Muslim nation.

Last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said the threat of terrorism to the United States is at its "most heightened" since the September 11, 2001, attacks -- a threat that she asserted has taken on a new and disquieting form because of the growing emphasis by Islamist terrorist groups on recruiting Americans.

If there was ever a moment when President Barack Obama should heed his former chief of staff's advice to never let a good crisis go to waste, the tectonic change sweeping the Middle East is that moment.

Washington will not get an opportunity like this -- to upgrade America's standing among the people of the Middle East at a pivotal time -- ever again. But for the people of the Middle East to believe, words are not enough. Decisive action based on a redefined set of 21st-century national interests is essential.

In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man. In the virtual world, his website is under attack and on the run.

There isn't much question that the person who obtained the WikiLeaks cables from a classified U.S. government network broke U.S. law and should expect to face the consequences. The legal rights of a website that publishes material acquired from that person, however, are much more controversial.

As Havana prepares for its first Communist Party Congress in 14 years in April, the United States should seize the opportunity to positively influence the economic blueprint the party is expected to approve.

For the United States there are few more strategically important places today than the tribal region of Pakistan, headquarters of al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, and also home to a syndicate of other militant jihadist groups from across Asia.

It is where Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a car bomb in Times Square in May, was trained. So was Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American who plotted to explode bombs on Manhattan's subways in 2009. It is also the source of a good deal of the violence that is racking neighboring Afghanistan.

Inside the Beltway and in capitals around the world, pundits closely watched this week's meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.