Abbas's Police State - By Jonathan Schanzer

President Barack Obama's administration has loudly touted its efforts to protect peaceful activists across the globe from regimes that would oppress them. On April 26, the White House issued an executive order to stop technology companies from helping Iran and Syria commit human rights abuses. The two countries have become what members of Congress have called "zones of electronic repression," where the regimes use modern technologies to crush those seeking democratic reforms.

But amid all this, Obama is missing an opportunity to promote positive change in a government over which the United States has much more leverage: Mahmoud Abbas's increasingly repressive fiefdom in the West Bank. On the same day as the White House issued its executive order, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency reported an explosive story detailing how Palestinian officials have "quietly instructed Internet providers to block access to news websites whose reporting is critical of President Mahmoud Abbas."

This wasn't a rogue operation. All signs suggest the order to shut the website came straight from the top. The Ma'an article, citing a Palestinian official, claims that Palestinian Authority Attorney General Ahmad al-Mughni personally delivered the order but that he "was acting on instructions from higher up in the government -- either from the president's office or an intelligence director."

Mughni had already come under fire for other draconian efforts to muzzle free speech. In January 2012, Palestinian security forces arrested Al-Ahram reporter Khaled Amayreh for criticizing Abbas and referring to Hamas strongman Ismail Haniyeh as the "legitimate Palestinian prime minister." They also detained several journalists and bloggers for critical writing. Among them was Jamal Abu Rihan, a Palestinian blogger who ran the Facebook page "The people want an end to corruption."

The arrests go on. According to al-Haq ("The Truth"), a Palestinian human rights group, "It is difficult to know exactly how many people have been detained in violation of the right to freedom of expression because victims, in many cases, are charged with or accused of penal offenses to mask the political motivation behind their arrest." In some cases, arrests appear to be roundups of Hamas supporters. In others, they appear to be aimed at non-violent political opponents or critics of the Abbas regime.

The repression also extends beyond Palestinian outlets. In July 2009, the Palestinian Authority banned Al-Jazeera from operating in the West Bank after the news channel reported on allegations that Abbas and former Gaza security chief Mohammad Dahlan were accomplices in the death of Yasser Arafat. In January 2011, following its publication of internal documents related to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations known as the "Palestine Papers," Palestinian security officers (among others) attempted to storm Al-Jazeera's Ramallah offices.

These and other incidents have had a chilling effect on reporting. As former Palestinian intelligence official Fahmi Shabaneh remarked in 2010, "al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets... are afraid to publish anything that angers the Palestinian Authority."

Amid such accounts, in April 2011, Human Rights Watch issued a 35-page report titled "No News is Good News: Abuses Against Journalists by Palestinian Security Forces." It revealed that Palestinian journalists in the West Bank "have had their equipment confiscated and been arbitrarily detained, barred from traveling abroad, assaulted, and in one case, tortured, by Palestinian security services."

What Lies Beneath - By William Tobey

There's one fear that keeps leaders from across the globe awake at night: The prospect that somehow, somewhere, criminals or terrorists are getting their hands on the essential ingredients of a nuclear weapon. At the nuclear summit in South Korea last month, policymakers gathered to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality by launching an initiative to secure all vulnerable nuclear stockpiles within four years. But despite the fanfare surrounding the summit, one of the greatest recent successes in this initiative has thus far remained buried -- both literally and figuratively.

In an extraordinary feat of engineering and international cooperation, U.S., Russian, and Kazakh scientists, engineers, and miners recently secured enough fissile material for a dozen nuclear weapons that had been left behind vulnerable to theft in tunnels formerly used by the Soviet Union for underground nuclear weapons tests in Kazakhstan.

The formerly secret mission was launched in 2005 at the encouragement of an intrepid U.S. weapons expert, after it was discovered that metal scavengers had penetrated the abandoned tunnels. The project received attention from the highest levels of government -- both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama monitored its progress. It is an example of the quiet but essential international cooperation that is urgently needed to prevent terrorists from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.

How this extraordinary, seven-year effort came to pass deserves the long version of the story. From 1961 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted hundreds of nuclear tests and experiments at a remote and forbidding site called Degelen Mountain. Located within Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk test range, the site is about the size of New Jersey and located some 300 miles east of Astana, the second coldest capital city in the world. It was chosen by the Soviets precisely because it is so desolate: Temperatures soar to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and plunge to -40 degrees in the winter. Blizzard conditions are common -- remarkably, they sometimes make the test site more accessible by filling in potholed roads, which have gone unrepaired since the Soviet era, with ice and snow.

The Soviets conducted over 450 nuclear detonations at Semipalatinsk, mostly in tunnels hundreds of yards long, buried deep below ground. Roughly 40 of the tests were small explosions with very low nuclear yields, so the fissile material -- highly enriched uranium or plutonium -- was neither consumed by the blasts nor infused into the molten rock created by them. Instead, according to one senior Obama administration official, hundreds of pounds of weapons-grade fissile material was "readily recoverable" in the tunnels. This did not matter much so long as the KGB, the USSR's premier internal security agency, held an iron grip on the Soviet Union, with special attention paid to remote and sensitive nuclear sites like Semipalatinsk. But when the Soviet Union crumbled into 15 independent countries in 1991, all that changed.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan gained its independence. But it came with a catch: Kazakh officials were now responsible for an environmental catastrophe, as well as a proliferation risk, at the former Soviet test site.

Indeed, the world did move quickly -- but sadly, insufficiently -- to contain this risk. Working under Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, which were launched by President George H.W. Bush's administration, to dismantle the former Soviet nuclear establishment in the 1990s, U.S. engineers helped to barricade 181 tunnels and demolish their entrances to prevent them from ever again being used for nuclear testing -- but, in a pre-9/11 world -- they paid little attention to the possibility of fissile material left in the testing tunnels.

The Blind Leading the Blind - By Sophie Richardson

Since local party boss and rising star Bo Xilai's stunning ouster from the Chinese Communist Party in April for "suspected serious violations of discipline," some of the world's best China watchers have been given room in the mainstream press to compare Bo to other top Chinese officials. We've learned much about the "princelings" -- leading cadres whose status in the political pecking order is a function of their parents' allegiance to Mao -- and the collateral damage that could be done to reputations by family members.

But in the long run, the more telling comparison about the nature of power in China today may be between Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who last week escaped house arrest in Shandong and made his way to Beijing, where he is reportedly seeking refuge in the U.S. Embassy. It isn't that Bo and Chen have similar agendas or found themselves in similar circumstances. It's that these two cases lay bare the extraordinary unpredictability inherent in authoritarian rule and the lengths to which people will go when they are utterly desperate.

Chen, blind since birth, began his journey through China's sometimes Kafka-esque politico-legal system in 2005. After unsuccessfully attempting to file a class-action lawsuit about abuses of the family-planning regime in Linyi City, he and his family members were subject to collective punishment and confined to their home for six months. In March 2006, authorities forcibly removed Chen from his home, telling the family nothing about his whereabouts or legal status for another three months. In June of that year, officials finally acknowledged Chen's detention, but threatened his lawyers and his family and initiated formal legal proceedings on ludicrous charges of damaging property and disrupting traffic. In August 2006, after legal proceedings that could be most charitably described as a kangaroo court, Chen was sentenced to four years and three months. But after he served his time and was released in September 2010, he and his family were again confined -- with no legal basis -- to their home.

Over the course of 2011, Chen, with the help of activists, released a video documenting the abuses to which he and his family were being subject by the dozens of guards who watched them around the clock. At the same time, growing numbers of concerned individuals and activists, as well as some courageous foreign journalists and foreign diplomats, attempted to visit Chen and his family; all were turned back by local thugs with varying degrees of violence. The alarming news kept coming: Chen's health was declining. His young daughter was prevented from attending school; after diplomatic intervention, local authorities "compromised" and allowed her to go -- accompanied by guards. Arguably most disturbing, Chen's young son, who was living elsewhere with other relatives, reportedly cut himself in order to be hospitalized, believing that his mother would finally be allowed to see him. She wasn't.

And so this year, the plan developed for Chen to break out of his and his family's surreal confinement. Last weekend, he slipped past his guards and made his way to Beijing, where he released a video calling on Chinese premier Wen Jiabao to investigate his situation, and pointing out what unnerves Chinese leaders more than just about anything else: that there is growing popular interest in his fate. Chen now appears to have sought sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy -- just days before the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings in Beijing -- and retributions are already being directed at those who helped him "escape."

Central government officials, when pressed about Chen's confinement, occasionally offered up variations on an extraordinary lie: He was free, having completed his sentence. He didn't want visitors, or was too poor to travel. At no point did they intervene or discipline those who held Chen. They were too busy with more important matters, such as the anticipated leadership change in late 2012.

Bo Xilai's star rose in part on the putative success of his similarly twisted interpretations of the law. During his tenure as mayor of Chongqing -- a city-state of 30 million people -- Bo cracked down relentlessly on some organized crime to generate local support. He tried to burnish his national political credentials with economic policies designed to reduce socioeconomic disparities and a neo-Maoist campaign that featured, among other things, schoolchildren singing Cultural Revolution-era "red" songs. Like many others jockeying for positions on the Politburo's Standing Committee -- the body, often consisting of nine members, that effectively runs the country -- he too was a "princeling." And along the way he too allowed the silencing of people like Chen. Bo's corruption drew the attention of veteran journalist Jiang Weiping and lawyer Li Zhuang; the former was sentenced in 2001 to eight years in jail for violating state secrets laws, while the latter was framed, tortured, and sentenced to 18 months in prison for defending a suspected crime syndicate boss.

War Dogs of the World - By Rebecca Frankel

Year of the War Dog It was just one year ago that the world first heard of Cairo, the dog who joined the mission that took down the world's most hunted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. The news sparked something of a sensation, and while Cairo might be the world's best-known war dog, he's far from a lone fighting force. The world of combat canines is vast, with a long and rich history, and these dogs have footholds on war fronts where you'd least expect to find them. From patrolling Moscow's train stations to thwarting insurgent ambushes in Afghanistan to guarding the borders of the West Bank to serving on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's private security detail, war dogs are essential to many of the world's most elite units, detecting bombs, detaining enemies, and saving lives.

Our Man in Baghdad - By James Traub

Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, has a remarkable ability to make enemies. As Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group puts it, "Personal relations between everyone and Maliki are terrible." This gift was vividly displayed in March, when the annual meeting of the Arab League was held in Baghdad. Although the event was meant to signal Iraq's re-emergence as a respectable country after decades of tyranny and bloodshed, leaders of 10 of the 22 states, including virtually the entire Gulf, refused to attend out of pique at Maliki's perceived hostility to Sunnis both at home and abroad, turning the summit into a vapid ritual. The only friend Iraq has left in the neighborhood is Shiite Iran, which seems intent on reducing its neighbor to a state of subservience.

It's true that Iraq is no longer a threat to its neighbors, as it was under Saddam Hussein. In that narrow respect, the U.S. invasion has made the Middle East a safer place, though at an unspeakable cost in Iraqi and American lives. But the hopes that Bush administration officials once entertained -- that a post-Saddam Iraq, perhaps guided by a secular figure like the émigré opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, would serve as a stabilizing, pro-American force for the region -- now look patently absurd. Maliki never had much interest in being a friend of the United States, and the departure of U.S. troops has allowed him to forget about it altogether.

What Iraq looks like today is an Iranian cat's paw. At the Arab League meeting, Iraqi diplomats blocked any effort to take robust action against Syria or even use tough language, thus advancing Iran's agenda at the expense of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which advocate arming the rebels seeking to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Immediately after the meeting ended, Maliki dashed to Tehran to confer with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Almost every Iraq expert I've ever talked to agrees that Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist who squirms under the Iranian thumb. But that's where he finds himself today. The question is why.

The most favorable interpretation of Maliki's foreign policy is what I call the Sonofabitch Hypothesis, put forward by Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Alterman argues that Maliki makes enemies because he pursues Iraqi national interests and "isn't afraid to communicate his dislike for people in a region where people prize politeness and solicitude." Alterman thinks that Maliki is in fact navigating a careful course among foes and false friends. An alternate theory is that Maliki is deeply paranoid, as another analyst who knows him and his circle well puts it, and is convinced that rivals at home and abroad are out to get him. Yet another view is that Maliki is a Shiite supremacist who views Sunnis as the enemy (and might also be consumed by conspiracy theories).

But one can be agnostic about Maliki's motivations and still conclude that he is doing harm to Iraq's own interests. No sensible Iraqi leader would pick a fight with Turkey, as he has done. Back in January, when Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suggested that Maliki should not be waging war against the Sunni opposition at home, Maliki accused Turkey of "unjustified interferences in Iraqi internal affairs," adding for good measure that Erdogan was seeking to restore Turkey's Ottoman hegemony over the region. This in turn led to another escalating round of insults and a mutual summoning of ambassadors.

Exit Taylor - By Johnny Dwyer

One afternoon, just before he took a job as a state judge in 1990, federal prosecutor Richard G. Stearns was clearing out his desk at the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston when he came across an old piece of evidence: the wallet belonging to Charles Taylor, a young Liberian bureaucrat he had attempted to extradite back to his homeland in 1985.

"He was a reasonably educated and polished in his own way," Stearns recalled. "But I did not honestly see him at that time as what he became, which was bloodthirsty."

Taylor was educated at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts before returning home to serve in the government of brutal dictator Samuel Doe. After falling out of favor with Doe, Taylor returned to the United States, where he was arrested in 1984 on embezzlement charges. Famously, however, he escaped from a jail in Plymouth before he could be extradited, emerged a short time later as a warlord in the Liberian bush, and fought his way toward the presidency of his country, building a political career through a succession of humanitarian catastrophes in West Africa.

The Taylor case remained a dangling thread for Stearns. Until Thursday.

Stearns -- now a federal judge in Massachusetts -- heard, along with rapt audiences in Freetown, Monrovia, and in the gallery at the Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague, what may be the final word on the former Liberian president's career: Taylor was found guilty on 11 counts of aiding and abetting Sierra Leonean rebels in crimes including the murder, rape, and conscription of child soldiers during that country's 1990s civil war.

Yet, for all the finality of the decision, questions linger. Was justice served in his trial? Did the proceedings clarify or further obscure Taylor's myth? And what impact, if any, will the court's decision have of on the future of Liberia?

Both Taylor's enemies and supporters, of whom many are still in influential political position in Monrovia, criticize the Special Court for holding Taylor to account for crimes related to Sierra Leone, rather than the civil war he launched in Liberia. As Taylor's former Defense Minister Tom Woewiyu said in an interview this week, "Those who are trying Taylor for Sierra Leone, they're more or less saying to what he did in Liberia, to hell with the Liberians."

Woewiyu said the nature of the court's indictment of the president while he was still in power in 2003 prompted questions over whether the international community -- the United States and Britain in particular -- were using the court as a means to remove him from office. The Special Court was intended to be an organ of international justice, not a cudgel of Western policies. But many of those involved, including Taylor himself, saw it as just that.

Tarred and Feathered - By Michael A. Cohen

Perhaps the two most important truisms about the politics of American foreign policy right now are: 1) Americans are pretty happy with Barack Obama's foreign-policy performance, and 2) they think George W. Bush was a foreign-policy disaster.

If you don't believe me, I present to you Vice President Joe Biden's major foreign-policy speech on Thursday, April 26, at New York University -- a combination of both the Obama administration's greatest hits and dark warnings that a Mitt Romney presidency would represent a return to the "failed policies" of the not-too-distant past, i.e., the Bush years.

Declaring that Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive, Biden aggressively defended the Obama administration's stewardship of the country's global interests. In key respects, it's hard to argue with Biden's mantra: The troops are out of Iraq, and they are starting to come home from Afghanistan; bin Laden is in fact dead, and America hasn't been hit by a major terrorist attack during Obama's presidency; and the country's alliances are in better shape, and relations with key allies have seemingly improved.

While some would no doubt quibble with Biden's taking credit for closing down foreign prisons and ending torture (while ignoring Guantánamo Bay and the administration's repeated executive power grabs) or boasting about Obama's development agenda, which has been anything but robust, the big themes of Biden's speech are compelling. More importantly, they are ones that have broad public support -- as indicated by Obama's sterling poll numbers on foreign policy and national security. This wasn't the usual Democratic fare of foreign-policy defensiveness and awkward chest-thumping (though there was a little of that). Instead, Biden's remarks represent perhaps the most confident and -- from the perspective of recent history -- counterintuitive foreign-policy speech given by a Democratic ticket since, well, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But it was the flip side of the vice president's argument that was perhaps most telling -- and indicative of how dramatically the foreign-policy terrain has shifted in just the past four years. Biden attacked the presumptive Republican nominee, Romney, for his inconsistency, recklessness, and occasionally contradictory statements on foreign policy. He hit him for opposing the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and for his description of Russia as America's No. 1 geopolitical foe. He attacked him for his lack of foreign-policy experience (even dredging out a 2007 quote in which Romney said that a president needn't be "a foreign-policy expert" and could outsource that responsibility to the State Department). But the real crux of Biden's broad assault was the notion -- repeated over and over again -- that a vote for Romney would represent a return to the Bush years. Said Biden, in one of the speech's more quotable, albeit hackneyed phrases, "to the extent he's [Romney] shown any foreign-policy vision, it's through the glass of a rearview mirror."

According to Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic pollster who served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council, Republicans, in general, still maintain a reasonably positive foreign-policy profile -- and Democrats have yet to make the case that they are the better party on national security. The Bush years are seen as something of an outlier to the usual legacy of GOP competence on national security, just as Obama is viewed as an outlier from the Democrats' legacy of fecklessness. From that perspective, it wasn't hard to figure out Biden's objective -- to turn the Bush and Obama exceptions into a new political rule.

The Work of All Nations - By Hashim Thaci

For all the terrible tragedies befalling the millions who have been murdered in mass atrocities, the human mind is best able to comprehend these crimes by remembering individuals we have seen with our own eyes, whether in person or in pictures.

So it was that, in his magnificent speech on Monday, April 23, about preventing as well as punishing genocide, U.S. President Barack Obama recalled two vivid images of inhumanity. The first was "an old photo" he himself had seen while visiting Buchenwald of "men and boys lying in their wooden bunks, barely more than skeletons," including a 16-year-old Elie Wiesel. The second was the suffering that Obama's great uncle had witnessed when, as a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War II, he "was stunned and shaken by what he saw when he helped to liberate Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald."

Of course, as Obama said, the Nazi Holocaust remains "a crime unique in human history." And I applaud him for declaring that "Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America."

Still, when I think about mass atrocities, the most vivid images that come to mind are those of my own countrymen and women, the Kosovar refugees from the conflicts of the late 1990s, who were shot at and shelled and streamed across the border to safety in Albania. And when I think about how to prevent such tragedies, it seems clear that America cannot do it alone and that the "core moral responsibility" belongs to us all.

Obama has committed the United States to doing the right things for this great cause. He announced the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board, with the aim of focusing the attention and resources of every U.S. government agency on anticipating and preventing atrocities before they occur. He is initiating new sanctions against those who use information technology to abuse human rights. He has asked for a national intelligence estimate of the risk of mass atrocities, instructed the Treasury Department to deploy financial tools against atrocities, and ordered the military to incorporate the prevention of atrocities into its doctrine.

While laudable, the actions of one nation alone will never be enough to prevent future atrocities. This must be, as Obama said, "the work ' of all nations." It must involve every country, on every continent, from small nations such as Kosovo to the major economic, political, and military powers.

Supersonic - An FP Slideshow

After the Pentagon announced it was increasing funds for the new model of the F-35 by another $289 million -- on top of the $379.4 billion already allocated to the program -- criticism of the ballooning budget has been sharp. As Winslow Wheeler writes for Foreign Policy, "[T]he F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program -- the most expensive in American history -- is a calamity."

Here's a visual tour of the planes that have caused all this controversy, a few of the alternative fighter jet models, and a sample of other designs of American planes.

Above, fighter crew chief Tech. Sgt. Brian West watches his aircraft approach for the first time at Eglin Air Force Base on July 14, 2011.

U.S. Air Force via Flickr

The Rubio Doctrine - By Joshua E. Keating

The reason for the larger-than-normal swarm of live-tweeting journos and telephoto lenses packing the Brookings Institution's Falk Auditorium for Sen. Marco Rubio's foreign-policy speech on Wednesday, April 25, was, of course, the rampant speculation that the young rising star from Florida is on Mitt Romney's shortlist as a vice presidential nominee. But if those in the crowd were expecting Rubio to audition for the role of partisan attack dog, they likely came away disappointed. If anything, the primary target of the speech was not the president, but the increasingly isolationist rhetoric of some members of Rubio's own Republican Party. This included some digs at positions held by his potential running mate.

Billed as a "major" foreign-policy address (though as Time's Michael Crowley points out, you never seem to hear about "minor" foreign-policy addresses), the speech was a robust and full-throated defense of an activist U.S. foreign policy and the oft-evoked but somewhat nebulous concept of American "leadership" in the world. This is a bit surprising given Rubio's political pedigree. When the senator was elected to the U.S. Senate as part of the 2010 Republican sweep, he was generally associated with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party and is still often referred to that way, though his relatively moderate views on immigration have alienated some former supporters.

In his foreign-policy views, though, Rubio seems to share more affinity with the neoconservatism of John McCain or even George W. Bush than the isolationism of fellow class of 2010 members like Kentucky's Rand Paul. He took aim at these tendencies right off the bat, noting that he believes he often has more in common with Democrats like Robert Casey and Robert Menendez, or independent Joe Lieberman -- who introduced him today -- than some Senate Republicans.

"I recently joked that today, in the U.S. Senate, on foreign policy, if you go far enough to the right, you wind up on the left," he said.

Rubio's foreign-policy views have evidently been recently shaped by a reading of Robert Kagan's The World America Made, a much-discussed refutation of the now-popular notion of American decline. He cited the author and Brookings scholar, who was sitting in the front row, repeatedly throughout the speech. (As a Romney advisor who has penned bedside reading for President Barack Obama, Kagan could plausibly claim to be the most prominently cited writer in Washington right now.) Rubio repeatedly echoed Kagan's arguments for the necessity of U.S. involvement in solving international crises.

In Syria, for example, Rubio supports "equipping the opposition with food, medicine, communications tools, and potentially weapons." This, he said, "will not only weaken Iran -- it will ultimately increase our ability to influence the political environment of a post-Assad Syria." He grumbled that his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seem "so concerned about the challenges of a post-Assad Syria that they have lost sight of the advantages of it." He also noted that "many of my loyal supporters were highly critical of my decision to call for a more active U.S. role in Libya."

At times, Rubio's speech could have served as a critique of the Romney campaign's foreign-policy statements. Whereas the inevitable Republican nominee has suggested that "it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to borrow money from the Chinese to go give to another country for humanitarian aid," Rubio defended the utility of aid, saying, "In every region of the world, we should always search for ways to use U.S. aid and humanitarian assistance to strengthen our influence" and cited the Bush administration's work on AIDS in Africa as an example.

The Competitiveness Crisis - By Uri Dadush

The recent news from Europe could hardly be more unsettling for those who desperately wanted to believe that the eurozone was finally finding its way out of the region's imbroglio. The collapse of the Dutch coalition government over budget cuts dramatically called into question the commitment of the staunchest supporter of the German hard line on the need for fiscal austerity. On the same day, the National Front, whose platform calls for an exit from the euro, gained a record 18 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections. And the results confirmed François Hollande, who wants to renegotiate the European Union's recent German-inspired fiscal pact to create room for growth policies, as a firm favorite to wrest the presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy. Not surprisingly, markets retreated and troubled countries such as Italy, Spain, and France itself saw their borrowing costs soar.

Indeed, every time Italy and Spain -- two of the world's largest economies, with a combined government debt that exceeds $3.5 trillion -- struggle to refinance their debt at acceptable interest rates, the eurozone and the global economy flirt with disaster. Yet while the commotion over bond spreads is entirely justified, it diverts attention from the main arena where the survival of the euro will ultimately be decided: the realignment of Europe's peripheral economies (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, or the "GIIPS") toward exports and import substitutes (think Spaniards buying fewer Japanese cars and more Spanish-made cars). Since domestic demand in the periphery is declining fast as finance dries up and budgets shrink, trade is the only hope for reigniting sustained growth in the region. Without growth, unemployment will keep rising from its extraordinarily high levels, political resistance to the monetary union will escalate, and it will become more and more difficult to service debts, with the very real risk that countries will be forced into default and -- possibly -- an exit from the euro.

Until recently, improved global economic conditions and large-scale liquidity injections by the European Central Bank (ECB) into European banks under its long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) program had reassured markets and kept Italian and Spanish bond yields well below their terrifying peak of last November. Global conditions can change quickly, however, and the policies adopted, however necessary they may have been, are more palliative than cure.

For example, Greece's debt remains unsustainable, and a second round of restructuring -- this time to include forgiving official debt as well as private debt -- will be needed. And the ECB's LTROs, which have so far shored up banks and supported government bond purchases, may backfire if, as is already happening, risk aversion returns and the prices of government bonds that banks have acquired fall again. While the periphery cannot avoid cutting government deficits, it may ultimately have trouble hitting its deficit targets if austerity stunts growth.

More important still, it is vital to recognize that the periphery's fiscal mess is not at the root of the euro crisis. The crisis, in other words, cannot be resolved with a fiscal fix alone, although a fiscal correction must be part of the solution. For example, Ireland almost halved its debt-to-GDP ratio (from 48 percent to 25 percent) between 1999 and 2007 and Spain nearly did the same (62 percent to 36 percent). These ratios were much lower than Germany's at the outbreak of the current crisis and, in Spain's case, they still are. Nor are weak banking systems the cause of the crisis in the periphery. When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, for instance, the Italian and Portuguese banking systems were in much better shape than their British, French, or German counterparts. Fiscal and banking problems, dangerous as they are, are a consequence of the crisis -- not their primary cause.

Fundamentally, Europe's so-called debt crisis is really more of a competitiveness crisis -- one that divides the eurozone's core (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Finland, and the Netherlands) from its periphery. The misalignment began in the mid-1990s as interest rates in the periphery declined to the lower levels found in the core, and domestic demand and inflation grew more rapidly in the periphery than in the core. This, combined with highly inflexible labor markets and limited competition in sectors ranging from pharmacies to banks, led to an erosion of competitiveness in the periphery -- reflected in wages outpacing productivity and prices in the sheltered sector (comprising everything from government to construction to coffee and barber shops) rising relative to the prices of exports and import substitutes, whose prices are determined in world markets. There followed a progressive reallocation of the periphery's production capacity toward the sheltered sector, most visibly toward construction in countries such as Ireland and Spain, which went on to experience the mother of all housing bubbles. Measures and estimates of the competitive misalignment in the eurozone vary. Typical estimates suggest that, in the periphery, the cost of labor, adjusted for productivity, is higher by 15 to 30 percent relative to Germany.

Obama's Jimmy Carter Moment - By Richard Williamson

In recent weeks, North Korea tested a long-range missile that could someday hold a nuclear warhead and threaten American shores. It is preparing to test a nuclear device for a third time. We are entering an exceptionally dangerous period, one that has us "within an inch of war," according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

It is difficult to know what kinds of calculations or miscalculations North Korea's young new leader and his entourage might make in the period ahead. But there are other reasons for worry far from the corridors of power in Pyongyang.

The last weeks and months have exposed profound dysfunction in the corridors of Washington where U.S. foreign and defense policy are formulated. With President Obama's foreign policy unraveling, his reelection campaign has been quick to attack Mitt Romney as a distraction. But events abroad may be bringing us to a juncture at which the inexperience and incompetence of a presidency crystallizes in the public mind. In short, we are approaching a Jimmy Carter moment. In a perilous world, this is not the kind of leadership our country needs.

The case of North Korea illustrates a foreign policy untethered from any overarching strategy. All recent administrations have wrestled with the challenges posed by the predictably unpredictable regime in Pyongyang. But few administrations have taken a sucker punch like the one delivered on April 14, when North Korea tested a long-range missile.

The North Korean missile launch may have failed in its purported objective of putting a satellite into space, but it certainly succeeded in its political objective of knocking the United States off guard. It was only weeks earlier, after all, that the Obama administration decided to trust the new leader and reached an agreement with North Korea promising food aid in exchange for halting missile tests and some enrichment activities. But it was no sooner agreed to than violated. By extending an olive branch to Pyongyang only to have it snapped off at the stem, the Obama administration's singular achievement was to showcase its own naiveté and weakness.

The trouble with naiveté and weakness is that they tempt aggression, which brings us to Syria. There Bashar al-Assad, another scion of a dictator, continues the carnage that has already taken some 9,000 lives and left so many others maimed by shellfire and torture. This has been going on for over a year. Here we get a clear picture of the Obama Doctrine in action: one part bluster, one part incoherence, and one part paralysis.

When the carnage began, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton downplayed the Syrian regime's brutality, emphasizing that many in Washington saw Assad as a "reformer." As the carnage continued unabated, she stated that "world opinion is not going to stand idly by." But in both instances, standing idly is exactly what "world opinion" -- supposedly led by the Obama administration -- has done.

Iran is the third corner in this triangle of foreign-policy failure. The basic fact is that the regime in Tehran is racing forward with its nuclear arms program. For more than three years, the Obama administration has ineptly pushed various buttons and pulled various levers, from engagement to belated sanctions and now back to engagement, without any sign that it is making progress toward its stated objective of stopping the Iranian bomb-building project. Its only accomplishment has been to give the ayatollahs time to enrich uranium, harden bunkers, and come closer to a nuclear weapons capability than ever before.

President Obama's lack of resolute action and the absence of demonstrable results make hollow his declaration that a nuclear-armed Iran is "unacceptable." The path he has set us on leads to a nuclear-armed Iran. And once that occurs, the unacceptable will -- to Barack Obama -- become the accepted.

Jimmy Carter's stewardship of foreign affairs came to a culmination in the twin disasters of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage drama. We can only hope that the final months of Barack Obama's term are not an occasion for similar disasters. But what his record underscores is the urgency of putting new and stronger leadership in the White House. Events are demonstrating on an almost daily basis that the team running the show is far out of its depth. A Mitt Romney presidency will not come a day too soon.

Après Moi, le Déluge - By James Poulos

"I'm not saying, 'After me, chaos,'" French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the newspaper Le Figaro with a wink in an interview published Friday, April 20, on the eve of the first-round election that saw him lose to Socialist Party leader François Hollande. But if Sarkozy was trying to make the indelicate point that, without him, the country is doomed if his looming electoral defeat in the May 6 runoff comes to pass, it's not just France facing an uncertain future. It's all of Europe. Critics like to paint the incumbent as "L'Omniprésident" and a "barbaric child," but the repercussions from his all-but-certain electoral rebuke might be vastly larger than "Tsarkozy's" critics take his ego to be.

1. The revenge of nationalism. Enthusiasts of the European project have more to fear than a historically strong showing by Marine Le Pen and her National Front party. Hollande's own brand of nationalism is equally suspicious of European austerity and Anglo-American cooperation. (He made waves announcing he won't go along with Britain and the United States in coordinating a release of strategic oil reserves.) Hollande's rise signals that leftist nationalism is no less ascendant than its equivalent on the right. Yet observers on both sides of the Atlantic have focused their fears on nationalist reactionaries, such as those dominating Hungarian politics, and have underappreciated two key developments.

First, thanks to the intimate center-right partnership between Germany's Angela Merkel and Sarkozy, the European left is quickly beginning to realize it does not hold a conceptual monopoly on transnationalism. The grand political project of putting nationalism in harmony with both globalization and ever-deeper European integration may express fundamentally liberal dreams. But its greatest proponents appeared on the right of center. Radicals' opposition to that project ensured that the respectable European left was unable to become its champion, while a man like Sarkozy faced no similar obstacles. Not until this election cycle has serious opposition to the harmonizing project emerged on the right. Sarkozy has tried to respond by pandering on immigration, but he is grasping. The respectable right is now the center of gravity for Europe's transnational hopes -- and the respectable left must consider what alternative to offer. For Hollande, who will likely now actually have to govern, the answer is simple: rediscover the nation as the focus of justice, and the state as its source.

Second, a deep disagreement over nationalism is brewing on the right, with the potential for far greater conflict than will be seen on the left. Norway's mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik might be crazy, but his transnational mission statement -- that European civilization is under mortal threat -- has broad conservative appeal. The burning question, if the right is right, is whether Europe as they have known and loved it can be saved on a nation-by-nation basis or whether a more unifying, transcendent approach is required. Some, such as Le Pen, answer resoundingly that only France, for instance, can save the French. Increasingly, other conservatives and reactionaries will demand that only a concerted, pan-European effort can measure up to the vast scale of the continent's religious and demographic change. A Sarkozy loss will strike a powerful blow against the idea that the conventional, center-right compromise on the nationalism question has any integrity. The European Union institutionalizes only one vision of transnationalism. In the long run, huge political possibilities could be opened up by a groundswell of right-wing interest in transcending the nation-state. In the immediate term, however, Sarkozy's departure will cause more people to fear transnational thinking as a vehicle for right-wing agendas.

Debating the War on Women - An FP Roundtable

Sondos Asem: Misogyny exists, but blaming it for women's suffering is simplistic

Shadi Hamid: Arab women have more agency than you might think

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: The Prophet Mohammad was a revolutionary feminist

Hanin Ghaddar: We need more badass ladies

Naheed Mustafa: "Nekkid Burqa Woman" is lazy and insulting

Leila Ahmed: Eltahawy misreads Alifa Rifaat

* * *

Sondos Asem:

When I marched to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25, 2011, I was driven by the indignities and suffering endured by all Egyptians, men and women, from decades of corrupt and oppressive rule. Despite the oppression, I believed in my power to effect change. I believed then and I believe now that to bring about that change, we need lots of determination and hard work.

Although I share many of her concerns, I respectfully disagree with Mona Eltahawy's simplistic assertion that the plight of women in the Arab world is the result of being hated by the rest of society -- more specifically, by men, and even more so by newly elected Islamists. In taking issue with Islamists' view of women, Eltahawy uses a combination of hyperbole and perhaps benign neglect to highlight offensive stances and bury more women-centered ones. Far from constituting a solution, this type of one-dimensional reductionism and stereotyping is one of the problems facing Arab women. Let's be clear: There is misogyny in the Arab world. But if we want progress for Arab women, we must hack at the roots of evil, not at its branches.

Indeed, the status of women is a serious challenge in post-revolutionary Egypt. Many Egyptian women suffer from discrimination both in society and in their homes. Some 5 million Egyptian women are the sole breadwinners for their families. Female genital mutilation (FGM) remains a widespread practice in rural areas and Upper Egypt. Sexual harassment abounds on Egyptian streets, and the list goes on. To address these issues, however, we ought to look at the bigger picture: More than 20 percent of young people remain jobless, and almost half of them are women. Illiteracy and poverty -- the twin drivers of discrimination -- are widespread: 20 percent of Egyptians are illiterate, and more than 40 percent live on less than $2 per day.

But how do we move forward? Based on these alarming figures, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has devised a holistic plan to advance women's standing in Egyptian society. First, we acknowledge that Egypt needs a cultural revolution alongside the political one. There are many practices -- not just FGM -- that must be eradicated outright, but railing against such practices will not make them disappear. Instead, what we need are sustained, nationwide campaigns to raise awareness and dissociate religion from repression of women. We also recognize that, in some cases, we cannot wait for educational efforts to take root. Both the legislative and executive branches of the state must play an immediate role. Legislation criminalizing harassment of and assaults against women must be passed, while ensuring that these measures are implemented by strict rule of law.

As a party that adopts Islam as its reference, we believe that our civil-society outreach can be as effective as legislative and executive avenues. Contrary to the underlying argument in Eltahawy's article, we believe that religion can be the main driver for renouncing violence and the repression of women. Islam empowers women both in their households and in society. Men and women are both entitled to the same level of respect, social status, and protection under the law.

Beyond the political and cultural realms, there is one other important plank in the struggle to advance the status of women. The FJP's platform and our flagship Nahda (Renaissance) Project both encourage and support female entrepreneurship while offering adequate health insurance to female breadwinners. Economic security for women is as essential as political and cultural change. Moreover, we are seeking to change the negative perception of women's political participation by promoting the active participation of women in politics and introducing successful female role models that will help counter stereotypes.

While ensuring that women have a vibrant role in society, the FJP is also concerned with making sure that families are supported and nurtured. However much people wish to be different, women remain the primary driver of family life. In many cases, they have to put in a great deal of effort both at home and at work. FJP will adopt a set of family-centered policies that enable women to support their family lives. We will not shy away from the value we place on family life nor will we accept that women who choose to focus on their families are somehow making an inferior choice.

A democratic Egypt in which the citizenry are informed and in which the rule of law is supreme will ensure the success of these programs and others, leading to the welfare of all society, with women as its backbone. Attributing women's suffering in our region to misogyny and hatred of women is overly simplistic and does nothing to help women in their struggle for dignity and justice.

Sondos Asem is senior editor of Ikhwanweb.com and a member of the Freedom and Justice Party's foreign relations committee. Follow her on Twitter @SondosAsem or @Ikhwanweb.

The Worst Places to Be a Woman - By Valerie M. Hudson

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Fire in the Sky - By Jason Miklian and Scott Roecker

The instant his 50-foot-tall, tungsten-tipped "dream" rocket pierced the stratosphere on Thursday, April 19, V.K. Saraswat could finally dare to exhale. Unlike with North Korea's disastrous display just days before, years of secret preparations by the director of India's Defense Research and Development Organization on its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) paid off flawlessly. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was among the first to offer congratulations, telling him that "you made the nation proud." The last time an Indian nuclear scientist was so honored, the country held parades and revelers even worshipped the bombs. The Buddha was smiling then; now, he's flexing.

Fifth in the Agni series (meaning "fire" in Hindi), this indigenously constructed missile can carry multiple nuclear warheads up to 3,100 miles away, putting not only Beijing in play, but also the Middle East, as well as sections of Africa, Europe, and Australia. It's also India's strongest display of military might since a series of 1998 nuclear tests. Then, the international community greeted the announcement with economic sanctions and widespread condemnation. This time is different. Images of the rocket's launch, its sides emblazoned with patriotic flags, ensured that Indian dailies and TV stations were powerless to resist from crafting Agni "high-five" headlines. Once the news reached the other side of the world, it garnered little more than the equivalent of diplomatic golf claps.

So why did countries that so aggressively (and even sanctimoniously) punished India less than 15 years ago act positively subdued this time -- and for a weapon with far more destructive potential? The answer lies not only in India's emerging global role, but also in the fact that India is hunting bigger, and unfriendlier, geopolitical game. Traditional rival Pakistan has long been viewed as India's binary strategic pole, and in 1998 both countries were chastised over fears that neither was responsible enough to be a nuclear power. Now it's clear that the biggest target painted by the test lies within New Delhi's neighbor to the northeast.

India has been saber rattling China for the last decade (which, according to then-Defense Minister George Fernandes, was a big reason for the 1998 tests), but the Agni V's range gives India its first legitimate deterrence-based threat to China's growing military might. The Agni V's actual capabilities are years away from the "deterrence parity" that giddy Indian analysts are already claiming, but while the ICBM may conjure feelings of near nostalgia in the United States among Cold War wonks and North Dakotan farmers tilling crops around abandoned underground silos, for India those four little letters herald proof of making the big time. Joining the exclusive nuclear annihilation capabilities club with Britain, China, France, Israel, Russia, and the United States, India now thinks it can redefine its nationalist pride and global standing merely by whom it picks fights with.

China is not the only one revising old irenic policies as it improves military capabilities. A muscular India is a perplexing sight for those with visions of the country as a land of Gandhian peace and nonviolent struggle, especially given India's historic role as one of nonproliferation's guiding lights. India spearheaded the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, arguing consistently in the United Nations for an end to nuclear weapons from countries forced to live under the shadow of the Cold War. Then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi forwarded a global action plan for nuclear disarmament in 1988. Today, however, abolition voices are marginalized while a prideful nuclear breast-beating leads top Indian dailies to declare the Agni V launch a Great Leap Forward -- without a trace of irony.

That's because at its core, the Agni V project isn't driven by credibility, deterrence, or even military strategy -- it's about mending a broken Indian psyche. The India-China relationship is as complex as it is acrimonious, inviting comparisons between the two for at least the last 65 years. Mao's People's Republic of China was founded two years after India's 1947 independence, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s the two massive states scored similarly on economic indicators, while squabbling over issues such as Tibet and skirmishing in minor border wars that, while largely inconsequential, humiliated India.

Glencore: What the Documents Tell Us

Read Ken Silverstein's riveting investigation of Glencore, the "biggest company you never heard of." Below are some of the documents he uncovered in his year of reporting on the hyper-secret, shady global commodities giant.

It is big, very big. The 1,637-page initial public offering (IPO) prospectus Glencore released last year revealed just how vast its reach is: The company controls more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world's seaborne coal; is one of the world's largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handles 3 percent of daily global oil consumption. All of this, the prospectus says, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011. Click here to see the prospectus document.

It is not afraid of operating in high-risk "frontier" regions. In a report on the IPO, Deutsche Bank says the company "benefits directly from the volatility" in global commodity prices -- especially in poor countries. Consider what the bank identifies as Glencore's "key drivers" of growth: copper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), coal in Colombia, oil and natural gas in Equatorial Guinea, and gold in Kazakhstan. Deutsche Bank delicately calls these places "frontier regions" or "challenging political jurisdictions" -- put simply, they all offer a dangerous mix of extraordinary natural wealth and various degrees of instability. (See page 12.)

2. Deutsche Bank -

It is well-connected in failed states. Glencore has managed to do business in the DRC, the poster child of the resource-cursed failed state, with the help of Dan Gertler, a diamond businessman from Israel who is known for his intimate ties to President Joseph Kabila. (He even reportedly has lent Kabila his private jet.) Glencore and Gertler are, through subsidiaries, shareholders in Katanga Mining. In 2009, Glencore sold stock in Katanga at roughly 60 percent of its market value to Ellesmere Global Limited, a British Virgin Islands firm whose "ultimate owner is a trust for the benefit of the family members of Dan Gertler," according to Canadian insider-trading records. Ellesmere quickly sold the stock back to Glencore at close to full market price, netting a profit of about $26 million.

Canadian Insider Trading -

It pays associates in unusual deals. In another example, detailed in this March 2011 contract, Samref Congo Sprl, a subsidiary 50 percent owned by Glencore, waived its rights of first refusal to acquire an additional stake in Mutanda Mining, a copper and cobalt producer, from Gecamines, Congo's state-owned mining company. Samref instead recommended that the shares be sold to Rowny Assets Limited, one of the offshore firms owned by Gertler's family trust. (See clauses C and D on pages 3-4 of the Gecamines contract.) It's not clear why Samref would have passed on the Gecamines offer, because business records and documents suggest that Gertler's trust picked up the Mutanda shares for a fraction of their value. Plus, the president and vice president of the Panama-registered Samref Overseas S.A., which owns Samref Congo Sprl, are both Glencore officials, and the vice president, Aristotelis Mistakidis, is even one of the handful of Glencore executives who became billionaires after the IPO. "We preferred to invest our money in developing Mutanda -- building the mines and the plant," Glencore spokesman Simon Buerk said in an e-mail explaining why the firm did not buy the shares.

Gecamines -

Rowny -

Samref1 -

Samref2 -

Bleak House - By David Rothkopf

One of the world's most respected finance ministers gave me his take on the eurocrisis in the wake of this past weekend's IMF meetings in Washington in a single word: "Bleak." Moments, later, in a separate conversation, frustration showed on the face of one of the IMF's top officials. He muttered his exasperation with the attitudes of top eurocrats, particularly those "with German accents." They failed to recognize, in his view, that their monomaniacal focus on austerity was sowing the seeds of its own political destruction. The people of southern Europe will only be squeezed so hard, he suggested, before they reject the deals, pending bargains, and economic prescriptions that Europe's northern powers are counting on to save the eurozone.

At a party thrown by JPMorgan, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan reportedly opined that the European monetary experiment was doomed from the start due to the divergent views and national characters of the disparate countries participating in the venture.

Then, over the weekend, the Dutch government, one of Germany's most important allies in making the case for austerity, fell. And in France, the first round of the presidential election both presaged the almost certain ultimate victory of Socialist François Hollande over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and, more ominously, showed the strength of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front party.

As the past week has shown, Europe's crisis lives on, seemingly more fueled than ended by high-profile "solutions" that have provided more questions than answers. In fact, the European financial crisis has been a case study in compounded mismanagement.

While the expectations of most of those with whom I spoke who participated in this weekend's discussions was that the Europeans have sufficient tools to avert catastrophe for the foreseeable future, there was also a clear sense that risks are nonetheless growing. Recession and the pain of belt-tightening would likely produce populist backlash on both the left and the right. Long-term recession in the south seemed certain. And if the malaise triggered bank failures, it might be every man for himself: Not all governments would pull together in bailing out financial institutions headquartered outside their immediate borders. Further, if a failure triggered a problem with a big American bank such as Morgan Stanley, the most often whispered victim, the bet was that neither the U.S. president nor Congress would have the appetite for an election-year bailout. "They'd let it fail," said a former top Obama administration official, expressing the view that this is what would appeal to the public at large.

For a moment, it almost made one wish for the good old days of George W. Bush. The ex-president left behind a wake of problems worldwide, notably associated with his administration's misguided prosecution of its "war on terror." But when the markets teetered late in 2008, he and his Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, stepped in and not only acted relatively quickly but marshaled the kind of collective action from the U.S. Congress that the body seems more or less incapable of unless it has a gun to its head. My guess is that in the future, the picture of the Bush presidency is going to moderate considerably, and his team's imperfect but ultimately decisive and fairly effective intervention in the markets during his last days in office will be counted to his credit.

Why Do They Hate Us? - By Mona Eltahawy

In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.

In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said. 

Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn't everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I'm not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.

It's easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament. Horrific news reports about 12-year-old girls dying in childbirth do little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, fueled by clerical declarations that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.

The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets) - By Karim Sadjadpour

In the early years of the Iranian Revolution, an obscure cleric named Ayatollah Gilani became a sensation on state television by contemplating bizarre hypotheticals at the intersection of Islamic law and sexuality. One of his most outlandish scenarios -- still mocked by Iranians three decades later -- went like this:

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let's assume that you're both nude, and you're erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

Such tales of random ribaldry may sound anomalous in the seemingly austere, asexual Islamic Republic of Iran. But the "Gili Show," as it came to be known, had quite the following among both the traditional classes, who were titillated by his taboo topics, and the Tehrani elite, who tuned in for comic relief. Gilani helped spawn what is now a virtual cottage industry of clerics and fundamentalists turned amateur sexologists offering incoherent advice on everything from quickies ("The man's goal should be to lighten his load as soon as possible without arousing his woman") to masturbation ("a grave, grave sin which causes scientific and medical harm").

Perhaps it's not entirely surprising that Iran's Shiite fundamentalists -- not unlike their evangelical Christian, Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, and Sunni Muslim counterparts -- spend an inordinate amount of time pondering sexuality. They are human, after all. But the sexual manias of Iran's religious fundamentalists are worthy of greater scrutiny, all the more so because they control a state with nuclear ambitions, vast oil wealth, and a young, dynamic, stifled population. Yet for a variety of reasons -- fear of becoming Salman Rushdie, of being labeled an Orientalist, of upsetting religious sensibilities -- the remarkable hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is often studiously avoided.

That's a mistake. Because religion is politics in a theocracy like Iran, uninformed or antiquated notions of sexuality aren't just confined to the bedroom -- they pervade the country's seminaries, military barracks, boardrooms, courtrooms, and classrooms. A common aphorism among Iranians is that before the revolution, people partied outside the home and prayed inside, while today they pray outside and party inside. This reverse dichotomy is true of a lot of social behavior in Iran. For many Iranians, this perverse state of affairs is now so ingrained, such an inherent aspect of daily interactions with Iranian officialdom, that it is no longer noteworthy. For those in the West who seek to better understand what makes Tehran tick, though, the regime's curious fixation on sex cannot be ignored.

To paraphrase the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, in the Islamic Republic of Iran all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political. Exhibit A is the revolution's father, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Like all Shiite clerics aspiring to become a "source of emulation" (marja'-e taqlid), Khomeini spent the first part of his career meticulously examining and dispensing religious guidance on personal behavior and ritual purity that ranged from the mundane ("It is recommended not to hold back the need to urinate or defecate, especially if it hurts") to the surprisingly lewd.

In his 1961 religious treatise A Clarification of Questions (Towzih al-Masael), Khomeini issued detailed pronouncements on issues ranging from sodomy ("If a man sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their marriage, the marriage remains valid") to bestiality ("If a person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel, their urine and dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful"). As a young boy growing up in the American Midwest, I remember being both horrified and bewildered after coming across these precise passages in a translated volume of Khomeini's sayings I found in our Persian émigré home.

Scholars of Shiism -- including harsh critics of Khomeini -- emphasize that such themes were the norm among clerics of Khomeini's generation and should be understood in their proper context: Islam was a religion that emerged out of a rural desert, and the Prophet Mohammed was himself once a shepherd. Whereas religions like Christianity and Judaism simply declare such behavior to be sinful, Islam addresses them from a juridical point of view.

The underlying problem, says Islamic scholar Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in the Shiite epicenter of Qom, is not that such issues were addressed, but the fact that "Islamic jurisprudence hasn't yet been modernized. It's totally disconnected from the issues that modern, urban people have to deal with."

Indeed, Khomeini's religious prescriptions are often the butt of jokes among Iran's post-revolutionary generations. "I've never even seen a camel in Tehran," prominent Iranian cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar told me, "let alone been tempted to have sex with one."

If there is a double entendre that aptly captures today's Middle East, it is the "youth bulge." The Arab world's median age is 22, Iran's is 27; Western Europe's, by contrast, is near 40. High levels of Internet and satellite television penetration, with their pervasive pornography, coupled with the region's youthful demographics, have accentuated the Muslim Middle East's fraught relationship with sexuality.

Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word "sexy" is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.

The Most Powerful Women You've Never Heard Of - By FP Staff

 

 

As New Zealand's prime minister, Helen Clark oversaw a decade of economic growth and won three straight terms in her post after a long career as a Labour Party legislator and cabinet minister. Less than a year following her departure as Kiwi prime minister, however, Clark turned to a much larger -- and more challenging -- stage: Since 2009, she has led the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the arm of the United Nations charged with confronting the world's worst problems, from global poverty to corrupt governance to health and environmental crises. Clark, 62, now oversees the UNDP's nearly $5 billion annual budget and more than 8,000 employees operating in 177 countries. Cholera in Haiti and famine in Somalia may be far from daily life for many New Zealanders, but Clark appears undaunted. Her top goal as administrator, she said last fall, is no less than to eradicate extreme poverty around the world.

 

 

Although they hold up "half the sky," as Mao Zedong famously said, women make up just over 20 percent of the delegates in China's national legislature. Former chemist Liu Yandong is the outlier: the only woman in the Politburo, the 25-member elite decision-making body at the top of the Communist Party pyramid. Considered a close ally of President Hu Jintao, she has a good chance of ascending this fall to become one of the small handful in the Politburo Standing Committee, the true ruling council at the center of the system. As with everyone in China's opaque Politburo, little is known about how Liu's politics differ from those of her colleagues, though some analysts think she favors increasing China's contacts with the outside world; the 66-year-old Liu has an honorary Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spoke at Yale University in 2009. She would be the first woman in Chinese history to make it to the Standing Committee.

 

 

With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's attention focused on the U.S. economy, tackling the brush fires of global economic calamity has often fallen to Lael Brainard. The even-tempered, Harvard-trained economist was born in 1962 and raised in communist Poland as the daughter of a U.S. foreign-service officer. She went on to serve on the National Economic Council during Bill Clinton's administration, working on the U.S. response to the Mexican peso and Asian financial crises. During President Barack Obama's administration, Brainard has been consumed with Europe's financial contagion, shuttling back and forth between Washington and European capitals (while her husband, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, travels to his portfolio in Asia) in an effort to convince leaders to prop up failing economies and prevent further spread. It's not always the easiest task, given that many European leaders blame U.S. policies for starting the crisis in the first place, but Brainard has brought tireless diplomatic energy to the job.

 

 

In March, the governments of South Africa, Angola, and Nigeria nominated Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director, to succeed Robert Zoellick as president of the bank. By tradition, the position has been held by an American chosen by the U.S. government, but Okonjo-Iweala thinks it's time for a change. "The balance of power in the world has shifted," she said following her nomination, arguing that developing countries "need to be given a voice in running things." For the time being, she is more or less running things in Nigeria, where she is in her second term as finance minister. In her first term, the Harvard- and MIT-educated economist received plaudits for negotiating billions of dollars in debt forgiveness with Nigeria's international creditors and launching a high-profile campaign against corruption. This time her task is made all the more difficult by a campaign of terror by al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram militants. Nonetheless, the 57-year-old Okonjo-Iweala is determined to make Nigeria an attractive place for international companies, a big challenge of the kind she is known for tackling.

 

 

As the first woman appointed permanent head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Mary Schapiro was bound to attract attention when President Obama nominated her in late 2008. Timing alone dictated it: She came to the SEC in the immediate aftermath of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff scandal and a market crash largely blamed on questionable financial practices and lax regulation. But the 56-year-old Schapiro, who first held a seat on the SEC from 1988 to 1994, is no stranger to contentious politics. She left the SEC in the 1990s to run the largest nongovernmental regulator of securities firms and spent the next decade going after industry insiders and critiquing Wall Street excesses. Since returning to the SEC, she has fought to re-establish public confidence in the commission, overseeing an increase in the number of cases pursued by the SEC and arguing for the authority to impose higher financial penalties. She has pledged to push for structural changes this year to help prevent another Lehman Brothers-style collapse -- a task that will surely be an "uphill battle," as the Wall Street Journal put it.

Down for the Count? - By Eric Pape

PARIS ' Like a boxer past his prime, Nicolas Sarkozy and his entourage keep making excuses for why the reigning champ of French politics hasn't already battered a lesser challenger, Socialist François Hollande.

In the middle of the brief official presidential campaign, the smack-talking Sarkozy asserted to Le Monde's weekend magazine that Hollande lacked the charisma, political skills, and decisiveness to put up a good fight. "I am going to win and I will even tell you why," Sarkozy said in comments published in late March. "He is no good and that's becoming clear. Hollande is worthless. He is worthless, you understand?" the president said emphatically, before asking the journalist to keep such un-presidential comments off the record. (Sarkozy later denied calling his opponent worthless.)

Last year, top members of Sarkozy's communications team at the presidential palace offered me their critique of Hollande, who they saw as particularly vulnerable, due to his absence of ministerial experience and what they argued was his lack of decisiveness. (Holland's supporters portray him, by contrast, as a thoughtful, decent, and consensual figure who is a welcome antidote to five years of President Sarkozy.)

The communications mavens at the Élysée Palace also outlined for me their vision for defeating Hollande. Sarkozy would declare his formal candidacy at the last possible moment (read: late winter) so that he could use his head of state gravitas as a bludgeon against the challenger's executive inexperience. After a flurry of heavy-hitting presidential actions, the legendarily deft Candidate Sarkozy would wow the French electorate, unleashing a volley of dynamic and ambitious proposals to highlight Hollande's perceived policy timidity. The overall assault would show Hollande to be a flabby upstart who lacked the chops, endurance, and peripheral vision to win the main event.

Tactically, Sarkozy would close the substantial gap in the polls that Hollande enjoyed since his nomination in the fall of 2011, and during his lightning-strike, two-month, first-round presidential campaign, mobilize the base and nab a surprise victory over nine other candidates on April 22. He would then seize on that momentum heading into a man-to-man face-off on May 6 to retain his title: president of the republic.

Despite Team Sarkozy's supreme confidence in their man, the first-round campaign has suggested a potentially devastating flaw in their analysis. The champ has clearly underestimated his main challenger, not fully understanding Hollande's key strengths: Unlike many other Socialists, he is unthreatening to the electoral center that ultimately decides French elections, he comes across as an Average Joe at a time when France craves a leader who can relate to their problems, and he has proven to be remarkably disciplined on a campaign trail for which he has proved remarkably prepared. By contrast, Sarkozy has neglected to prepare for this election anywhere near as relentlessly as he did in 2007. His inner circle repeatedly suggested in the months leading up to the official campaign that Sarkozy had an almost omnisciently lucid view of his own political plight, and that he could turn on his old campaign magic at a moment's notice.

Back on Planet France, that hasn't happened. In reality, the Sarkozy campaign has been a bit like his presidency. He has offered numerous big ideas, but without a coherent argument about where he will lead France. Worse, his failed first-term promises to bolster purchasing power, cut unemployment to 5 percent, and restore French economic dynamism have weakened the ability of this year's mega proposals to convince. Worse, from a promise-keeping standpoint, several of the signature measures that Sarkozy enacted at the start of his presidency -- like a huge 10 percent tax cut on the wealthiest 20,000 French people - were reversed on his orders as the 2008 economic crisis deepened into a global recession. And in a time when most French people want more social justice and fewer rich tax scofflaws, Sarkozy is perceived more as the embodiment of the era that led to the economic crisis, not a solution to it.

So it was hardly a surprise when Sarkozy's late entry into the formal campaign didn't have the potent punch that he dreamed of. He lagged well behind Hollande in the fall when the former Socialist Party leader became its candidate, and he still lagged the Socialist in early March, largely because the French believe that Hollande better understands their dinner-table economic concerns and that he is more likely to do something about them.

Then, in mid-March, an event happened that seemed to hold the potential to shake up the electoral fates in France. Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of North African lineage who grew up in a ghetto on the outskirts of Toulouse, went on a horrific rampage in which he executed three off-duty military men and attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse, murdering a rabbi and three young children. The 10-day killing spree ended in a standoff in which police marksmen killed Merah in his apartment in a shootout that authorities related in almost cinematic terms.

5 Secrets Anonymous Should Steal From China - By Adam Segal

2.The Ministry of Defense

After announcing an 11 percent increase in defense spending this year, pushing the military budget over $100 billion, Chinese officials and defense analysts moved quickly to reassure the world that the spending was "reasonable" and in "accordance with Chinese economic development."

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, however, estimates that China's real defense spending is as much as 50 percent higher since the official number does not include the space program and foreign weapons purchases.

The higher the number, the greater the diplomatic challenge China faces in convincing its neighbors that its long-term intentions are peaceful. The Central Military Commission lacks a public website, and the site of the Ministry of Defense, an outward-facing portal probably not connected to sensitive military networks, is unlikely to provide any real nuggets. Anonymous may be able to piece together some figures by going after defense universities, military academies, research institutes and universities tied to the space program, and domestic and Russian arms dealers.

3. Xinhua  

Over the last decade, China has witnessed an almost predictable cycle of crisis, cover-up, exposure, and eventually limited, but government approved, discussion of the event. SARS, Tibetan riots, and the crash of a high-speed train provoked a knee-jerk effort to control information followed by a relatively greater degree of transparency. Reporters from Xinhua, China's official press agency, play two roles in covering events like these: They package the approved story for public consumption and send detailed investigative reports to high-level officials about what actually happened.

Like everyone else with an email inbox, these journalists are susceptible to spear-phishing attacks. Using information gathered on Weibo and other social media accounts, Anonymous could spoof emails with infected attachments or links to malware, like those that were sent to pro-Tibet activists. With access to everything on the journalists' computers, they could release emails revealing clearer pictures of government cover-up and corruption.

The Stubborn Past - By Alex Gibson

A few months ago I watched, from the twentieth row of a university auditorium, as Pablo del Río, a soft-spoken man in his early thirties with an ill-kept beard, gave testimony to a panel of judges. In a halting voice, his eyes fixed on the floor, he described events early on the morning of March 17, 1976, when his father was beaten and kidnapped by a group of plainclothes thugs acting on behalf of Argentina's military dictatorship. The next night the elder del Río was shot dead as he lay in his hospital bed. His offense: membership in a leftist political group.

The younger del Río clearly found it excruciating to testify in public about his father's murder. From time to time his swivel chair creaked as he turned to face the elderly defendants seated in the two front rows:

"You don't kill people," he told them, his voice trembling with rage. "You just don't kill people."

Del Río could just as easily have been addressing the broader public beyond the courtroom. Today, 35 years after the fall of the most brutal dictatorship in the country's history, Argentina is still grappling with the legacy of violence it left behind. In the provincial Argentine university city of Bahía Blanca, 17 former soldiers and police officers are standing trial on more than a hundred counts of murder, kidnapping, and torture. But the proceedings have much broader implications than a conventional criminal proceeding. The white-haired men in the dock stand for the members of an implied community -- families, friends, and neighbors -- who have never really acknowledged their links to the horrors of that era. The trial, which has already lasted for almost a year, is due to end next month.

Located seven hours south of Buenos Aires by car and nestled between the South Atlantic coast and the dry plains of Patagonia, Bahía Blanca offers a fitting microcosm of Argentina's divided soul. It is a medium-sized, affluent city that includes both bastions of progressive politics and a sizable contingent of staunch conservatives. It is home to a prestigious and politically liberal university, the Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS). But it also has a significant military presence and hosts the largest naval base in Argentina. Its main newspaper, La Nueva Provincia, is one of the most conservative in the country.

In what later came to be known as the "Dirty War," the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 sent as many as 30,000 political protesters, students, and labor activists to their deaths in clandestine detention centers. Though armed leftist groups did mount a challenge to the government at first, soon the only enemies of the state that remained were young men and women, often guilty of little more than attending the wrong rally or owning the wrong book. Nearly 5,000 people died in Argentina's largest clandestine detention center, the Navy Mechanical School in Buenos Aires (commonly known as "La Escuela," or "the School"). In Bahía Blanca, the local army unit set up its own perversely named torture center, "La Escuelita" ("the Little School"), in an abandoned building just beyond the city limits. (Last month, Alicia Partnoy, one of the survivors of La Escuelita, testified at the Bahia Blanca trial, repeating an account she has also described in a remarkable memoir of her experiences.) Even today, signs of those years of terror are hidden in plain sight around the city -- like a small plaque in the university hallway commemorating the spot where two uniformed men shot a student dead after he was caught passing out political leaflets. The bullet holes have been plastered over, but the ensuing decades have failed to heal the country's wounds. (The photo above shows María Graciela Izurieta, who disappeared in Bahía Blanca in 1976 and has never been seen again.)

Bad Boys and their Toys - An FP Slide Show

 

It's every boy's dream: a fast car, a long straight road that stretches to the horizon, an almost limitless supply of cheap gas, and immunity from speeding tickets. But if you're a Middle Eastern potentate or a dictator, it's reality. As the Formula One circus rolls into Bahrain this weekend, green-flagging a controversial race that critics say adds legitimacy to a repressive regime, we thought it would be a good time to look at the childish love of dictators have for all things shiny and fast.   

Last week, Turkmenistan's "democratically elected" president Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov casually rolled up to his country's first ever racing event in a gaudy, garishly painted $2.2 million Bugatti Veyron supercar -- and then, of course, proceeded to win the race. No word on whether the professional race car drivers got points for not trying.

April Is the Cruelest Month ' for China - By Sophie Richardson

For China's cautious leadership, no news is good news -- and this has been a bad month. Rising tensions with the Philippines in the South China Seas have reached a point that Beijing has deployed ships. The ceasefire in Syria seems to be fraying -- again. Sudan and South Sudan are again engaged in armed conflict. And the United States, whose decline the Chinese leadership continues to trumpet, continues to pivot closer to Asia and is on the brink of dispatching an ambassador to Burma. The only good news seems to be North Korea's failed rocket launch.

What is most threatening to Chinese leaders, however, is the scandal of deposed Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, arguably the biggest domestic political crisis in China since 1989. The year 2012 appears unlikely to play out at home or abroad the way the Chinese leadership had hoped -- with a smooth political succession underscoring China's rise to a global power. The state media directives of the past week suggest the Communist Party is scrambling to impose a return to normalcy; it's likely that the government will be very risk-averse in the coming months as it tries to contain the fallout from Bo's ouster.

But the rest of the world isn't going to stop turning. The current generation of leadership will likely step down during this fall's 18th Party Congress to make way for Xi Jinping and his colleagues. In the previous large-scale power transfer in China, in 2002, the country was at most a middle power. The next generation, stewards of what is now the world's second-largest economy, will have to confront a treacherous foreign policy landscape where their country is enmeshed in arrangements and disputes in practically every country around the world.

Chinese workers, diplomats, and property are increasingly the targets of protest or violence across the globe, particularly in locations involving significant Chinese-backed infrastructure projects. Over the last 12 months, rebels kidnapped Chinese oil workers in Sudan, disgruntled locals protested against the Myitsone Dam in northern Burma, and environmental activists occupied the Chinese Embassy in Quito, Ecuador. It's increasingly clear that not everyone believes the Chinese government's line that its rise is "harmonious."

The violence against Chinese expatriates is reprehensible. But it nevertheless spotlights one of the worst dimensions of Beijing's "going out" strategy: tone-deafness to local voices. Despite its current domestic preoccupation, the upcoming Chinese leadership needs to learn to solicit and accommodate dissenting views regarding investment and diplomatic activity in other countries. It would also benefit from a significant investment in consular services for its own citizens, who increasingly find themselves caught in such conflicts.