The Dictators Are Smarter Than You Think - By Christian Caryl

Dictators are supposed to be dumb, or at least crazy. Muammar al-Qaddafi was a ranting lunatic with a goofy fashion sense. Kim Jong Il had a weird hairstyle and a penchant for surreal sloganeering. Those generals in Burma were brutes given to consulting soothsayers on major decisions and shooting people at the drop of a hat.

But these caricatures -- for that is what they are -- actually tend to obscure some unpleasant facts about modern life. Qaddafi reigned for 41 years in a country where fractiousness and rivalry were the order of the day in the era that preceded him. Kim Jong Il died in his bed after ruling North Korea for 17 years -- despite policies that condemned his country to humiliating poverty even while its neighbors rose to new heights of prosperity. And those generals in Burma? They came to power in 1962, and though they've started loosening their grip a bit lately, they still clearly call the shots.

All of these dictators managed to cling to power far longer than they or their people had any right to expect. They were evil, all right. But you can't call them dumb. Measured by their own criteria, they were actually pretty successful.

This is something that we'd be advised to keep in mind if we're going to help the forces of freedom to prevail in the world. And this, indeed, is one of the lessons of Will Dobson's fascinating new book, The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy. Dobson, a former FP editor who now works for Slate, got the idea a few years back when he was invited to a strategy game with some pro-democracy activists who were trying to undermine an authoritarian regime in their home country. When Dobson asked if he could play the role of the dictator, he was met with blank stares. "We're not in the business of teaching people to repress other people," he was told.

The problem, of course, is that you probably won't have much luck beating despots unless you understand what they're up to. In his book, Dobson sets out to rectify that error by exploring five current authoritarian regimes and their strategies for maintaining control. He interviews Chinese Communist Party members and Russian dissidents. He follows Malaysian leader Anwar Ibrahim on a frenetic day of campaigning that dramatizes the challenges of organizing a unified opposition in a country riven by ethnic divides. In Venezuela, he records a memorable encounter with a once high-ranking ally of Hugo Chávez now doing time in jail -- a striking testimony to the capriciousness (or, perhaps, ruthless flexibility) of the regime. And even though much of his reporting from Egypt predates the fall of the Mubarak regime, his sharp analysis of the disposition of forces there is as illuminating as many of the accounts that have come out since the revolution.

The key message that emerges from Dobson's investigations is that today's autocrats are not idiots. They have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. Putin is not Stalin, and Hu Jintao is not Mao Zedong. In many cases, Dobson writes, modern dictators understand that it's in their interest to observe the appearance of democratic norms even while they're subverting them.

Chávez, for example, loves holding elections, and on election day you can pretty much vote for whom you want. That most Venezuelans end up voting for the president reflects the enormous effort he has put into manipulating the media, the courts, and the bureaucracy every other day of the year. "Election day is not a problem," a former Venezuelan election official tells Dobson. "All the damage -- the use of money, goods, excess power, communications -- happens beforehand."

Losing Polio - By Laurie Garrett

Last week, a Pakistani doctor was sentenced by his government to three decades in prison for actions that helped the United States kill Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, in far-off Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a state of emergency in its decades-long battle to eradicate polio. That these two events are intimately connected speaks volumes about new challenges -- political ones -- that threaten to undermine extraordinary global health achievements.

A tribal court in Peshawar sentenced Dr. Shakil Afridi to 33 years' imprisonment for treason -- a penalty considered mild given that the nontribal Pakistani government courts would have ordered death by hanging for the same alleged crime. Afridi collaborated with the CIA's efforts to determine if the secretive family residing behind high compound walls in Abbottabad in 2011 was the bin Laden clan, as U.S. officials suspected. His role was to use a fake hepatitis-B vaccination campaign to gain access to the children in the compound, administer immunization, and retain the needles for use by CIA lab scientists to identify the youngsters's DNA.

Bin Laden was indeed inside the compound, which was raided by U.S. Navy Seals on May 2, 2011, resulting in the death of the al Qaeda leader. U.S. officials later told the New York Times that Afridi had failed to obtain the desired DNA samples, but the physician has publicly admitted to collaborating with the CIA in the vaccine ruse. A chorus of U.S. politicians and Obama administration officials have denounced Afridi's conviction, arguing that the doctor had not acted in betrayal of his country, but in opposition to al Qaeda. This week, tribal court documents were released showing that the doctor's ultimate "crime" was an alleged association with the militant Pakistani insurgent Mangal Bagh, a claim widely dismissed by human rights observers as false.

The same day Afridi received his sentence, leaders attending the Geneva meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO's governing body, declared a state of emergency in the global effort to eradicate polio. With a $1 billion shortfall and only the last 1 percent of polio to go, WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan declared on May 24, "polio eradication is at a tipping point between success and failure. We are in emergency mode to tip it towards success -- working faster and better, focusing on the areas where children are most vulnerable."

In the 1980s, an estimated 350,000 children in 125 countries annually contracted polio; the WHO believes that this year, just 100 cases of the disease have surfaced worldwide. The end is so near that the Rotary Club, which has made eradication of polio one of its core missions, has champagne on ice. In February, the WHO declared that for 12 months India was free of polio for the first time in the known history of the massive nation, leaving just three countries in the world with endemic polio: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Not coincidentally, all three have huge Muslim populations. Nigeria has struggled with polio control since 2003, when a group of imams in the country's Islamic north declared the vaccine was deliberately contaminated with either HIV or contraceptives, the result of an alleged CIA campaign to wipe out Muslim children. The conspiratorial view of polio control was shared by some imams and Muslim politicians in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So last July, when it was disclosed that the CIA had used Afridi and a false vaccination campaign to gain access to the Abbottabad complex, I co-authored a warning with Dr. Orin Levine that the CIA had "destroyed credibility that wasn't its to erode." We wrote: "It was the very trust that communities worldwide have in immunization programs that made vaccinations an appealing ruse. But intelligence officials imprudently burned bridges that took years for health workers to build."

A year later, we have crossed a Rubicon, as WHO Assistant Director General Bruce Alyward told the World Health Assembly. Polio has been eradicated from all the world save those pockets least likely to have faith in Westerners, and the final assault on the virus is hampered by distrust that was in part sown by the CIA. Worryingly, religious leaders in Southern Sudan are reportedly now advising mothers to refuse vaccination for their babies. The WHO, the Rotary Club, and other leaders of the anti-polio campaign have enlisted support from top Muslim religious figures around the world to counter such vaccine apprehensions and conspiratorial views. But it's hard when the conspiracies prove true.

The tragedy is that we could be on the verge of a new outbreak, just as we are on the verge of success. The continued wild-type polio circulation -- the epidemiological term for various natural forms of the virus -- in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan causes grave concern in India, where any reintroduction of the virus carried by outsiders into Indian territory could be dangerous due to under-immunization of millions of babies, now children, in pre-2010 campaigns. Even as India changed vaccination tactics and was bringing its polio caseload down to zero, incidence soared in next door Pakistan last year. In late 2011, 10 cases of wild polio turned up in China, carried across its border from Pakistan into territory where health officials had eradicated the disease.

What the Hell Should We Do About Syria?

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Arm the Guerrillas

Randa Slim: Talk to Iran

Bilal Y. Saab: Don't copy Yemen

Andrew J. Tabler: Cut off Assad's lifelines

Andrew Exum: Lock up the WMDs

A Family Affair - John Garnaut

In today's China, all corruption is relative.

Yes, the demise of Politburo member Bo Xilai has captured international headlines for exposing how political power and family money melded together in Chongqing, his mist- and smog-shrouded pocket of southwest China. While Bo was reviving Maoist nostalgia on his official's salary of about $1,600 per month in a country whose per capita income ranks 121st in the world, his son was renting a presidential-style suite at Oxford and driving a Porsche at Harvard. Bo's elder brother adopted an alias to control $10 million worth of shares at the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of a state-owned bank. And Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, stands accused of being involved in the murder of her English friend Neil Heywood after a falling out over money.

Yet in a Communist Party notorious for nepotism and which refuses to subject itself to any law, the Bo family's known financial antics were in fact relatively modest. Two of his wife's sisters are worth upwards of a combined $126 million, according to a Bloomberg investigation. But the fortunes of other powerful political clans almost certainly extend into the billions, as a months-long investigation into the business dealings of one of China's most prominent families makes clear. Through years of influence-peddling and investing, multiple sources close to him say, the son of a former Chinese vice president managed to place himself at the center of a variety of lucrative deals across all aspects of China's economy, from coal mines to the stock market to shopping malls, amassing so much money he ended up buying a $32 million family mansion in Australia.

And his success exemplifies the ability of regime insiders to work the system for their own personal gain -- and make a mockery of the legal system in China. Although the private wealth of the party's princelings -- the well-connected sons and daughters of top officials -- is usually well-concealed, they are increasingly dominating the market for blocking and lubricating the arteries of public- and private-sector wealth. Stock exchanges double as vehicles for converting family political capital into cash, which can be re-converted into political power, sometimes by means as blatant as "auctioning" official positions for sale. State-owned enterprises and bureaucracies can be ruled like personal fiefdoms, with contracts allocated to relatives and useful friends, while entrepreneurs shift their profits and loyalties in exchange for regulatory protection.

Some of China's most respected public intellectuals are warning that society and economy are being held hostage to the wealth-maximizing requirements of the political elite. These warnings echo privately in business circles, too, where entrepreneurs continue to be enthralled by the prospects of short-term profits but increasingly alarmed about their personal and financial security. Officials in developed countries, and even Chinese entrepreneurs themselves, report a steep increase in business people and capital leaving China. "Nine out of ten of my business clients are in the process of applying to emigrate, if they haven't already," one of China's most successful investment bankers told me last week (he is in the process of emigrating to Canada). Executives at state-owned companies have grown incapable of acting in the interests of their companies, he says, and China's entire system of allocating resources "is malfunctioning."

Of all the inside deals that abound in China, few compare in scale and audacity to the clandestine privatization scheme that Chinese journalists uncovered in 2007. Caijing magazine discovered that 92 percent of the shares in the state-owned power generating company Luneng, with net assets valued at $9.47 billion, had been secretly transferred the previous year to two unknown private companies for $478 million. When Chinese leaders learned the identities of the princeling children involved, they pressured the magazine's publisher and editor and forced a follow-up article to be recalled as soon as it hit newsstands. Documents cited by Caijing suggest the handful of new owners might have received a windfall gain in the vicinity of $9 billion from the deal.

Foreign Policy has learned that the most sensitive individual involved was Zeng Wei, the then 37-year-old son of former president Jiang Zemin's right-hand man Zeng Qinghong. While details of profit shares, valuations of Luneng assets and debts, and the identity of several other leading families remain disputed, Zeng Wei's involvement has been confirmed by a person integral to the original investigation, business and social acquaintances of Zeng Wei who count themselves as friends, and a recently retired senior official closely acquainted with Zeng Qinghong. The transaction was subsequently unwound but no senior figure on either side of the transaction, including the current head of China's electricity grid company, ranked no. 7 on the Forbes 2011 list of the world's largest corporations by revenue, is known to have faced disciplinary action. Exactly what happened to the $9 billion remains unknown.

It's hard to overstate how crucial Zeng Qinghong was to the ruling elite at the time his son was involved with these machinations: That same year, he brokered the surprise deal that installed Xi Jinping as the president-in-waiting, a masterwork of consensus-building among warring party factions. In 2008, just months after the Xi deal was presented to the Chinese public as a fait accompli, Zeng's son Zeng Wei paid $32 million for a home with a nine-car garage in Sydney, the most egregious confirmed example of a princeling flaunting his wealth. According to a family friend of Zeng Qinghong, the notoriety of his son's financial dealings -- and not only regarding the power company Luneng -- was one factor in his decision to retire after he handed the vice presidency to Xi in 2007. Although Zeng had reached the semi-official retirement age of 68, he also declined the customary honorary positions and confined his power-broking role to giving personal advice only to Jiang Zemin, says the family friend.

Flame Thrower - By Tim Maurer and David Weinstein

Welcome to the new frontier of cyber-espionage, and remember this name: "Flame" -- a mysterious new cyber spy tool that hit the headlines on Monday, May 28. Its code is 20 times larger than Stuxnet, the mysterious computer worm that temporarily crippled Iran's Siemens nuclear centrifuges, and it "might be the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed" according to Kaspersky Lab, a Russian-based cybersecurity firm. Kaspersky published the findings of its analysis on Monday in addition to the Iranian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and Budapest University. Most of the infected systems are located in the Middle East, with Iran, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Hungary topping the list. Flame stands out in the various ways through which it "exfiltrates" data, including surreptitiously recorded audio data captured by internal microphones. However, unlike Stuxnet, Flame was designed to spy -- not destroy.

The variety of spy tools that Flame employs is astonishing. According to Kaspersky, "of course, other malware exists which can record audio, but key here is Flame's completeness -- the ability to steal data in so many different ways." It also takes snapshots of instant messages and records a user's keystrokes. Flame is remotely controlled through a command and control server and it's highly dynamic. In other words, it has been updated remotely since it was first launched at least as early as March 2010 and its "creators are constantly introducing changes into different modules" which expand its functionality. Now that it has been detected, the Iranian CERT apparently offers infected users a removal tool.

According to the Washington Post, some analysts see the United States and Israel behind Flame. Kaspersky will only go so far as to say that it's likely the work of a nation-state rather than a private entity or hacking group because of the sophistication and the geographic location of the infected systems, For now, the perpetrator's identity remains unknown. Flame was designed to avoid being detected, hiding in large amounts of code and using a programming language unusual for malware. Victims include individuals, private companies, educational institutions, and state-related organizations. Other details are also unclear at this point, however, such as how Flame accesses a system in the first place. Kaspersky considers Flame an operation likely to have been run in tandem with Stuxnet.

Unlike Stuxnet, Flame was designed for a non-destructive purpose. That said, both types of code essentially consist of three elements, according to Herb Lin, chief scientist at the National Research Council: a vulnerability, access, and payload. Think of a computer system as a walled-in garden. The first objective is to find a hole in the wall to get into the garden. A vulnerability in the computer system -- the hole -- will allow that access to the system. Once inside the garden, there are basically two ways it plays out determined by the payload. A cyber-espionage payload -- like Flame -- walks around making copies and taking pictures of what's in the garden. By contrast, a cyber-warfare payload -- like Stuxnet -- destroys what's in the garden. 

The Five Worst Atrocities of the Syrian Uprising - By Uri Friedman

The Syrian government's crackdown on protesters and armed rebels has produced a seemingly endless stream of grim and grisly days, with more than 9,000 civilians perishing in the violence since March 2011, according to U.N. estimates. Yet some incidents have garnered more international attention than others, either due to the scale of the bloodshed or the savagery of the attack.

The slaughter of more than 100 people on Friday in Houla, a series of villages near the Syrian city of Homs, is proving to be one of these incidents. The U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the killings, U.N. envoy Kofi Annan hurriedly organized a meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in an effort to salvage his peace plan, and governments around the world expelled Syrian ambassadors and diplomats. Der Spiegel is calling the massacre "Syria's My Lai," while Reuters has described it as "an atrocity that shook world opinion out of growing indifference." But a look at the incidents that have played this role most prominently during the 14-month-old uprising suggests that the outrage will fade away once the headlines do.

MURDER OF HAMZA AL-KHATIB

Last May, gruesome images of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib's mutilated body stunned the international community. Here's how the New York Times described the footage at the time:

Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

"These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar," the narrator says. "Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?"

Human rights activists claimed that the boy had been arrested at a protest in southern Syria, tortured to death, and handed over to his family in return for their silence. Syria's state-run media, for its part, contended that Hamza died from gunshot wounds during an attack by armed groups on Syrian forces, and that Bashar al-Assad met with the boy's family to express his condolences as soon as authorities were able to identify the corpse.

Hamza's death inspired a popular Facebook page and mass anti-government demonstrations across Syria. "Arab revolutions -- and associated social and international media -- seem to thrive on icons," the BBC's Jim Muir wrote at the time, "and the Syrian revolt appears to have found one."

MEHDI FEDOUACH/AFP/Getty Images

The Conservative Defense Revolution - By James Jay Carafano

What a difference a year makes.

On Memorial Day 2011, many not only paused to remember the fallen, but lamented the fall of the American military. The perennial question about defense spending -- "How much is enough?" -- had been supplanted by "How low can you go?" This Memorial Day, the consensus that Washington is ready to reap another "peace dividend" is under assault.

How we got here from there matters. America became a different nation after 1945. The United States emerged from the ashes of World War II as a global power with global interests and responsibilities. That meant it would have to think about defense differently. So a nation that had averaged spending about 1 to 2 percent of its national wealth on defense began spending, on average, about 8.5 percent during the Cold War. A good chunk of that went to confronting the Soviet Union.

No one, however, had really done the math to figure out how big a military would have been required to secure U.S. global interests if the standoff with the Soviets had never happened. Consequently, when the wall fell, nobody knew the answer to that question -- except that it had to be "less." And, so, U.S. defense spending headed to under 3 percent of GDP, and U.S. defense capabilities began to contract.

The rise and fall of the Pentagon was, by and large, a bipartisan project -- albeit not always a pretty one. Robert Taft, the anti-New Deal Republican senator from Ohio, hated NATO, mostly because Truman was for it. Kennedy was more of a defense spending hawk than Eisenhower. Both the far-right and the far-left abandoned the war in Vietnam. It was not uncommon to find a hard-line "Scoop" Jackson who caucused with Democrats and an über-liberal Jacob Javits huddling in the Republican corner.

By the end of the 1990s, there was plenty of evidence that U.S. military capabilities were in the basement. "[O]ur forces are showing increasing signs of serious wear," Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Clinton, testified before Congress. "Anecdotal, initially, and now measurable evidence indicates that our readiness is frayed and that the long-term health of the total force is in jeopardy," he warned. But neither political party in Washington seemed terribly interested in doing anything about it.

Along came 9/11, boosting investments in the armed forces to a post-Cold War high. There was little doubt the tide had turned -- though challenges remained. The lion's share of additional spending went to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The preponderance of military aircraft, ships, and vehicles, bought in the 1980s, were now pushing 30 years of service and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, that bill is still unpaid.

G.I. Joe - An FP Slideshow

It has been a tumultuous year for the U.S. Armed Services, one that included the complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq and preparations for a dramatic drawdown of combat troops in Afghanistan, the end of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, the removal of a dictator in Libya, and a strategic pivot to Asia. At the same time, the American military has weathered a scandal over burning Qurans in Afghanistan and stared down the barrel of a looming budget fight in Congress.

For Memorial Day, FP takes a look at the last year in the life of the troops on the front lines, from young cadets on their graduation day to wounded veterans learning to live with disabilities.

Above, U.S. Marine Capt. Tom Kearns, of Bordentown, NJ, gets a fist bump while patrolling through a village near Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge near Kajaki, Afghanistan. The Marines were responsible for securing the area around the Kajaki Dam on the Helmand River.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The FP Summer Reading List - By Margaret Slattery

The summer ahead promises new books from veteran foreign correspondents, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and a former secretary of state -- plus, theoretically, some vacation time to be able to read them. From a dissection of the marketing strategies of U.S. brands like KFC and Pizza Hut in China to a revelatory report on secret clashes between the United States and Iran to a satirical novel about religious and class-based discrimination in Pakistan, here are 12 titles from the world of foreign policy to add to your summer reading list.

1. China Airborne, James Fallows (May 15)
Amid the ever-growing crowd of commentators tracking China's rise, Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows has homed in on a single industry - aviation -- as a crucial test case for the country's efforts to modernize and compete with the United States. With 2,600 modern aircraft, China's commercial fleet is now second only to America's (though still only about half as large). Fallows reports that two-thirds of airports under construction today are in China, and as part of its 12th Five-Year Plan, announced last year, the country pledged a quarter trillion dollars to its aerospace industry -- not a guarantee of success, but a commitment worth watching nonetheless. As the New Yorker's Evan Osnos summarizes, "Instead of pretending to encapsulate this contradictory country and place, [Fallows] unpacks one industry with great skill ... and uses it as a persuasive metaphor for measuring China's progress toward its own aspirations."

 

 

 

2.What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China's Modern Consumer, Tom Doctoroff (May 22)

What does it take for a Western brand to win over China's 1.3 billion consumers? It's not a question of converting them, argues Tom Doctoroff, a longtime advertising executive and commentator who has spent more than a dozen years in mainland China; it's about finding ways for Western products to become "vessels of Chinese culture" in their own right, acknowledging the family and nation as the "eternal pillars of identity" in the country. That means promoting consumer goods more for the status and ambition they signal than their monetary worth, and ensuring that they offer external as well as internal payoffs -- marketing Skippy for its "delicious peanut taste" as well as its "intelligent sandwich preparation," for instance. "Even beer must do something," Doctoroff writes. "In Western countries, letting the good times roll is enough; in China, pilsner must bring people together, reinforce trust and promote mutual financial gain."

 

3.Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, Charles H. Ferguson (May 22)

In the two years since Charles Ferguson's Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job portrayed the "systemic corruption" in the financial services industry that led to the 2008 crisis, anti-corporate sentiment has grown, most notably during the Occupy Wall Street protests that flooded city squares last fall. Now, Ferguson has written a book expanding on the film's themes. He traces the financial collapse back to early deregulation efforts in the 1980s, while also pointing the finger at the Clinton-era "dismantling" of regulatory policies like the Glass-Steagall Act, as well as George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich. "Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy," Ferguson writes, echoing Occupy rhetoric. "The American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population."

 

4.It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership, Colin Powell with Tony Kolts (May 22)

Colin Powell is the latest of George W. Bush's administration to publish a memoir, following Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice last year and Bush himself the year before that. Powell's book recounts the lessons he's learned throughout his life, beginning with his childhood in the Bronx through until his time as a four-star general and ultimately as secretary of state. His discussion of his role in the war in Iraq is likely to garner the most attention. Powell, who famously argued before the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, says in the book that he was unaware at the time that the evidence he presented had been prepared by the vice president's office, rather than the National Security Council. On the war itself, Powell says he thinks U.S. troops "did quite well," but notes, "there was an assumption ... that this was all going to snap back in place," and "it became obvious early on that was not going to be the case."

 

5. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Mohammed Hanif (May 29)

Acclaimed for his first novel, 2008's A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Pakistani writer Mohammaed Hanif has returned with a second book of satirical fiction. At the center of the novel's lively mix of characters is the protagonist, Alice, a young Christian recently released from a women's jail and now working as a nurse in a Catholic hospital. While humorous -- Alice's husband is a Muslim bodybuilder named Teddy Butt -- the book also explores the deep-rooted discrimination against Pakistan's poorest, among which Alice and her father, a janitor, count themselves. As Hanif explained in a recent interview, the prejudices Alice encounters are "not just because she is Christian; these prejudices are basically because she's a woman, and ever more important, these prejudices exist because she is poor."

White Whale - David Weigel

The military wants it. Business wants it. But to get it, they have to get past conservatives who simply don't trust the United Nations -- or, more specifically, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The treaty has spooked them ever since 1982, when it opened for signature, even though it has been widely supported by their more moderate Republican brethren. Whatever specific qualms its opponents raise, the treaty's real problem is that in the last 30 years, compulsive U.N. skepticism has moved from the fringes of the GOP into its mainstream.

The right's fear that the United States might somehow give up its sovereignty to the one-worlders at Turtle Bay has driven the treaty's supporters to distraction. At a Senate hearing held Wednesday to explore the possibility of American ratification, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has largely shed her negative 90s-era image, slipped into the lingo of the Janet Reno/Ruby Ridge era. "[I've] heard we should not join this convention because, quote, 'It's a U.N. treaty,'" said Clinton, "and of course that means the black helicopters are on their way." Opposition to the treaty, she said, is "unfortunate because it's opposition based in ideology and mythology, not in facts."

Republicans were unconvinced. "Most wars we've fought have been fought over ideology and philosophy," said Idaho's Sen. Jim Risch, who's been winning elections in his state since 1970. "If we give up one scintilla of sovereignty that this country has fought, has bled for, and have given up our treasure and the best that America has, I can't vote for it."

The Law of the Sea Treaty, as the convention is commonly known, was written to standardize maritime law (which is why the Navy supports it) and create some authority for the use of resources found in or at the bottom of international waters (which is why the Chamber of Commerce supports it). And even though it was negotiated at the United Nations, the U.N. doesn't actually have any control over the treaty's implementation -- there's a distinct organization to handle that.

But the treaty spooked conservatives straightaway. Before it was even finalized, President Reagan worried that "the deep seabed mining part of the convention does not meet United States objectives." Ultimately, he refused to sign the treaty for that very reason, but even that rejection wasn't enough for the right wing of his party -- probably because Reagan said he would nevertheless abide by the rest of the treaty's terms, which he found sensible. In 1983, around six months after the treaty was completed, Sen. Jesse Helms put a hold on Reagan's nominee for ambassador to El Salvador. Thomas Pickering, said Helms, had raised disturbing questions just by participating in the Law of the Sea Conference.

From there, the treaty got stuck in U.N.-skeptic limbo. George H.W. Bush began renegotiating its mining provisions so the U.S. could sign on, a process that Bill Clinton's foreign-policy team continued. "There are still parts that need to be resolved," said incoming U.N. ambassador Madeline Albright at her 1993 Senate confirmation hearing, "but I think we should pursue it." One year later -- after fixing the provisions that had irritated Reagan (with a little advice from the business community) -- Albright signed it. In 1996, even Helms had started to soften, admitting at one hearing that "ratification of this treaty does not in any way place the United States in any way under the jurisdiction of the Law of the Sea Treaty."

But it was impossible to get the Senate to approve it. The mining issue had been replaced by a fear of communist nukes. In 1998, when the president made a real push, the boldest "hell no" case came from a Reagan DOD vet named Frank Gaffney. The Chinese, he warned the Senate, had the capability to "discover undersea bastions in which to conceal and operate their ballistic missile submarines." Ratify the Law of the Sea and you'd give them "legal cover for further transfers of this sort of equipment." Whatever that meant.

The George W. Bush administration came in fully intending to ratify the treaty. But a new era -- we could call it the "Gaffney/Inhofe era" -- had begun. Gaffney materialized whenever treaty opponents needed intellectual ballast. His Center for Security Policy was an armory for pro-sovereignty, pro-defense buildup arguments. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe got to the Senate in 2002, the year Helms retired. The torch was passed. In 2004, when the Foreign Relations Committee took up the treaty, Inhofe pushed against it, questioning the "implications of this convention on our national security."

Romney: Year One - By Daniel W. Drezner

Sure, some might argue that there would be no real differences between the second-term foreign policy of President Barack Obama and the first-term foreign policy of President Mitt Romney. They might even be correct in pointing out that foreign-policy campaign rhetoric matters little once the candidate becomes the president.

Just for fun, however, what if all those campaign words did matter? What if President Romney had to implement every foreign policy campaign promise he's ever made in every foreign-policy white paper, op-ed, campaign statement, or random utterance that came from his campaign? What would the first year of a Romney presidency look like when it met the real world?

The editors of Foreign Policy thought that would be a fun little thought experiment, and they've been keenly aware that I have paid close attention to Romney's foreign policy musings. So, at their request, here's what the first year of a Romney administration would look like for world affairs.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

The Name Is Bond. Eurobond. - By Heather A. Conley and Uttara Dukkipati

The word on the lips of many of the 17 leaders of the eurozone following this week's meeting of heads of state -- the 18th summit, for those who are counting -- is Eurobonds. The ideas behind them, though, are out of sync. "Europe can have Eurobonds soon," Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti insisted. "[The] taboo surrounding Eurobonds has been lifted," European Council President Herman Von Rompuy declared. Not so fast, German Central Bank chief Jens Weidmann chimed in, "It is an illusion to think Eurobonds will solve the current crisis."

So, what exactly is a Eurobond? Briefly put, it is a tool intended to collectivize debt across all eurozone countries. Right now, to raise funds, eurozone members have only one option: selling national bonds. The market determines the value of these bonds based on each country's fiscal and economic health. The problem is that as some European countries were roiled by a national asset bubble (Ireland) or experienced a decade of lackluster economic growth while racking up unsustainable levels of debt (Greece and Portugal), they became unable to tap private markets, and their existing debt became prohibitively expensive to pay back. To service their debt, these countries had to receive funds from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. But with the crisis deepening and spreading to Italy and Spain, it looks like another solution is required: the Eurobond.

In theory, Eurobonds would allow debt-ridden countries like Greece to borrow at more affordable interest rates. For instance, according to the Guardian newspaper, if Eurobonds were adopted, Portugal would see its annual debt repayments fall by as much as $9 billion or 9 percent of GDP. Other struggling European countries, such as Italy, Spain, or even France, would likely see similar savings.

But even as Eurobonds relieved the crisis in the periphery, they would increase the borrowing costs of countries in better financial health. For example, according to same article, if Eurobonds were introduced, Germany's borrowing costs would rise above the current eurozone average, costing Berlin an extra $62 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, per year to service its debt.

What prevents the wealthier countries, or more specifically Germany, from getting to yes on Eurobonds? In a nutshell, moral hazard: If Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were allowed to borrow at lower rates, the market pressure to implement deep and difficult structural reforms would disappear.

The path to European redemption, according to German leaders and the European Central Bank, must only come through difficult reforms and fiscal discipline, not the same sort of low-cost borrowing that got the periphery countries into their current difficulties. This moral hazard argument was precisely why Germany demanded a fiscal compact treaty (which maintains strict fiscal debt and deficit limits) in December in return for additional bailout funds.

There are also legal arguments against Eurobonds. At present, EU treaties expressly forbid joint debt liabilities within the monetary union. The introduction of Eurobonds would require several treaty amendments and very likely ratification by eurozone members. Eurobonds are likely also unconstitutional in Germany, and would require at least 10 legal changes, according to the Guardian. Sorting out the legal and political challenges could take years.

The Eurobonds debate also extends to the form and scope of these bonds. Since 2000, there have been at least six different proposals on how to structure a Eurobond. To simplify, we place the Eurobond discussion into three separate categories:

Door No. 1 is the maximalist definition of Eurobonds, requiring that all 17 eurozone countries completely mutualize their current stock of debt and issue common bonds. In other words, they would ensure joint guarantees, meaning that each member state not only pays for itself but also the obligations of any other country -- say, Greece -- unable to meet its liabilities. Germany hates this door, but it would do the most to mitigate market pressures on the periphery.

The 7 Worst Songs of Eurovision 2012

Azerbaijan, which has recently jailed human rights protesters, cracked down on dissidents, and ignored politically motivated murders, might not seem like the most likely place for Eurovision's 2012 Song Contest. Unfortunately, the storm of criticism for the government in Baku isn't quite loud enough to drown out the music itself. From Russian babushkas imploring the audience to "come on and boom-boom" to mohawked male Irish twins in tin-man jumpsuits whose music was once declared an "act of war," here's a round-up of seven contestants who shouldn't have made the trip. And people wonder why America is still the king of cultural exports.

Russia: Buranovskiye Babushki - "Party For Everybody"

Parties aren't just for Miley Cyrus and the USA anymore. The Buranovskiye Babushkis are grandmothers, all originally from the village of Buranovo in the Udmurt Republic. There were eight of them, but only six are allowed to appear at Eurovision. The grannies wrote the song themselves in their native tongue, Udmurt. This isn't the babushkas' first time at Eurovision; in 2010 they performed "Dlinnaja-Dlinnaja Beresta I Kak Sdelat Iz Nee Aishon" ("Very long birch bark and how to turn it into a turban"), finishing third. If they win this year, the grandmothers say they'll use their new cash monies to build a church in their village.

Power Ballad - By Haley Sweetland Edwards

BAKU, Azerbaijan ' I had trouble shaking the feeling in Baku this week that I'd stumbled into the prettier side of a nation-sized Potemkin village.

From the moment my plane touched down on Monday afternoon, everything was eerily perfect: the sculpted topiaries on the side of the highway, the immaculate white stone boardwalk, the freshly planted geraniums in flower boxes, the ubiquitous London-style cabs with paisley-shaped flames -- part of Azerbaijan's official branding campaign -- licking up the sides.

Even the newly construction Crystal Hall, a glittering purple-lit building that calls to mind a bejeweled crown on Baku's Caspian shoreline, was somehow perfect in its architectural homage to the occasion: the Eurovision Song Contest, the Old World's annual bacchanal of campy, tacky pop.

Having won Eurovision 2011 with Eldar and Nigar's treacly duet, "Running Scared,"Azerbaijan is this year's official host country. The week-long competition, which began officially with the first semi-final on Tuesday, has drawn performers, along with handfuls of their more adventurous fans, from 43 countries around Europe. All told, it's expected to attract only about 20,000 visitors to Baku, but Eurovision has always been more of a long-distance spectator sport. An additional 125 million television viewers -- that's about 10 million more people than watched the Super Bowl this year -- are expected to tune in to the show this week and, by extension, get what will likely be their first glimpse of Azerbaijan. Eurovision is, in other words, this small South Caucasus country's chance to strut its stuff on the European stage or, as one official put it to me, "to show people we are an actual European nation."

Perhaps with that in mind, Azerbaijan pulled out all the stops. Its oil-rich government hasn't revealed the official amount it spent prettying up the place for this week's festivities, but it's expected to be the most expensive Eurovision on record by a factor of nearly 20. Local NGOs estimated the final bill will hover around $700 million -- a figure that includes the construction of Crystal Hall, which is the venue for the competition, the outfitting of a back-up auditorium in case the hall wasn't completed in time, the purchase of that fleet of London-style cabs, and sundry "beautification" efforts in downtown Baku.

To be fair, it does look pretty impressive. An Azerbaijani man, Shohrat, who sat next to me on Monday night at the dress rehearsal for Tuesday's semi-final commented with awe about the dancing light show above the hall, the newly refurbished tourism site nearby, and the brand new, space-age white buses that shuttled us around. Gesturing at the stage itself, a Las Vegas-style affair outfitted with geysers of fire and a working fountain, Shohrat utilized what I would later come to understand was his favorite English phrase: "Very nice," he said solemnly. "Very, very nice."

The only problem is that the Azerbaijani government's goal of appearing to be an "actual European nation" ends with the appearance part. Sure, it's got the credentials: Azerbaijan was admitted to the Council of Europe in 2001, and its gross domestic product has been growing at an average of 10 percent for the past five years (a fantasy for many in the European Union) but it's also got this nasty habit of brutally silencing its press, jailing its dissidents, and arbitrarily confiscating land from its people.

Take the glitzy new Crystal Hall, for example. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of homes were razed to pave the way for that twinkling venue. Homeowners were often not consulted about the plans, rousted by bulldozers without warning, and then given piddling sums in compensation. Local rights organizations say the same thing has been happening routinely since 2009, with the government intent on building a Dubai-style skyline virtually overnight.

Five World Events That Could Swing the U.S. Election - By Uri Friedman

The prevailing political wisdom is that the economy -- not foreign policy -- will determine who becomes the next president of the United States. When voters were asked in a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week what the single most important issue was for them in choosing a president, 52 percent said jobs and the economy (and they're evenly split on whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney would do a better job on the latter). To put that figure in perspective, the second most-cited issue was "Health care/repealing Obamacare" at a mere 7 percent, while foreign-policy issues such as terrorism and the war in Afghanistan each mustered a measly 1 percent of responses. In January, the Pew Research Center concluded that the American public is more concerned with domestic policy than at any point in the past 15 years.

But every politician lives in fear of that 3 a.m. phone call that can upend the best-laid campaign plans. Here are five global events that could send the U.S. election careening along a very different path than the one it's traveling down today.

A SHOWDOWN WITH IRAN

World powers are currently wrapping up a second round of contentious nuclear talks with Tehran and the European Union is preparing to roll out an oil embargo on Iran in July. But if this diplomatic tack fails to wring meaningful concessions from Iran, there's an outside chance that Israel -- or, in a less likely scenario, the United States and its allies -- will conclude before November that military action is the only way to halt Iran's nuclear advances (some have even suggested that it's in the interests of Israeli leaders to strike Iran's nuclear facilities in the run-up to the U.S. election). Americans see Iran as the country that represents the greatest threat to the United States, and a recent Pew poll found that 63 percent of Americans are willing to go to war if necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons -- a measure that Romney has promoted more aggressively than Obama, though both candidates have said that all options are on the table.

Some market analysts estimate that a military conflict with Iran could push gas prices in the United States to between $5 and $6 per gallon, alienating voters and jeopardizing the country's fitful economic recovery. And there's a reason why the National Journal's Charlie Cook has dubbed Iran the "wild card" this campaign season: The last five times gas prices have spiked during a U.S. presidential campaign, the incumbent party has lost the election. As the New York Times put it in January, the standoff with Iran presents Obama "with choices that could harm either the economic recovery or his image as a firm leader."

Amateur Hour in Chicago - By Arif Rafiq

As last weekend's NATO summit made clear, President Barack Obama's Hamlet-like indecisiveness on Pakistan plagues his administration's relationship with the country and its president, Asif Ali Zardari. Obama remains unable to effectively manage the need to both apologize to and reengage Pakistan, while at the same time moving the country away from supporting militant groups that destabilize it and the region.

Since November, the Obama team has agonized over whether it should apologize for the deadly U.S. air attack on a Pakistani Salala military base along the border with Afghanistan. Twenty-four Pakistani soldiers died as U.S. helicopters fired on the Salala base for two hours, including more than an hour after Pakistani liaisons pleaded for the attacks to stop. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that planned apologies to Pakistan were aborted numerous times -- including once after Qurans were found to be desecrated by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Washington has expressed "regret" and offered its condolences for the incident.

For all the importance Obama claims to place on Pakistan, he has taken a back seat in directing the sinking partnership with Islamabad. In the extensively sourced Wall Street Journal report, the president is missing from the narrative. The internal administration debate on whether to apologize to Pakistan seems to be one among principals, deputies, and senior aides. But the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is too important for Obama to delegate.

As a candidate, Obama argued not only that the war in Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the real post-9/11 war, but also that Pakistan holds more strategic importance for the United States than Afghanistan. In a June 2008 address, Obama said, "as president, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] the top priority that it should be." He added, "The greatest threat to that security [in Afghanistan and the United States] lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan." In Obama's first two years as president, his administration reviewed America's AfPak strategy not once, but three times, with numerous course corrections along the way. Numerous press accounts portray the president as deeply and very personally involved at key points in the decision-making process.

Contrast that with his behavior at the NATO summit: Initially, the White House told reporters the president would not meet with Zardari, a clear snub. But this clashed with the administration's strategy of enhancing and maintaining support with Pakistan's civilian democrats while taking the military to task. By summit's end, the administration backtracked -- realizing that a complete snub of Zardari could hurt Pakistan's fragile democratic transition -- and Obama held two "brief" meetings with the Pakistani president. The White House highlighted these interactions, yet emphasized that they were not especially substantive. Obama then awkwardly avoided mentioning Pakistan in his press conference at the summit's close. (He referred to NATO's commitment to bringing "peace and stability to South Asia, including Afghanistan's neighbors," but Pakistan is the only South Asian state that borders Afghanistan.) Finally, Obama gave an extensive response to the first question from the media, which was on Pakistan, giving the impression that his discussions with Zardari were wide in scope. The Obama administration's behavior was not carefully calibrated diplomatic messaging, but tactical maneuvering that was imprecise, difficult to decipher, and verging on passive aggression. It was amateur hour.

The president's refusal to apologize has kept U.S.-Pakistan relations frozen at last winter's nadir, and the spring has seen no thaw. Relations could have been back on track had the president swallowed his pride and allowed his diplomatic team to bring Pakistan on board to secure a lasting peace in Afghanistan.

Don't Fear the Grexit - By Thomas Oatley and Kindred Winecoff

The news Wednesday that European Union finance ministers may be preparing contingency plans for a Greek exit from the eurozone sparked a fresh round of commentary about global financial turmoil in which financial writers interpreted perfectly ordinary market performance in the United States as a "selloff" triggered by the Greek crisis.

Renowned commentators are also ringing the alarm bells. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently predicted that "[t]hings could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs -- both economic and, arguably even more important, political -- could be huge." The developments in Greece even have some commentators invoking the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers, which touched off the greatest global financial crisis and economic depression since the 1930s, and has called into question the resilience of global governance institutions. Over at the Financial Times, Martin Wolf argues that the "danger of contagion" from a Greek departure "is obvious," that "the risk that a bigger eurozone upheaval would cause a global crisis is real," and that the fallout "would be worse than [the aftermath of] Lehman Brothers' failure in 2008."

Can we all take a deep breath now?

Our research on global financial networks indicates that these concerns are overstated. Further economic and financial deterioration in Greece would certainly have negative impacts there and might adversely affect Greece's southern European neighbors, who are facing similar circumstances. But financial weakness in Greece is unlikely to spark a global crisis analogous to the one triggered by Lehman Brothers' collapse in September 2008 -- even if economic woes eventually force Greece to exit the monetary union. Instead, the global consequences of southern Europe's debt crisis are more likely to resemble the Latin American sovereign debt crises of the early 1980s, the East Asian crises of 1997-1998, and Argentina's crisis at the turn of the millennium. Each of these had significant local effects -- widespread bank failures, sharp increases in unemployment, large exchange-rate devaluations, deep recessions -- that were not transmitted globally. Indeed, in each of these cases the global economy continued to grow (see the graph below), major world equity markets held their value, and world trade expanded. None had the dramatic global consequences sparked by Lehman's collapse.

As the graph below demonstrates, the recent subprime mortgage crisis, which hit the center of the financial system, took a far greater toll on the global economy than the peripheral crises that struck East Asia and Argentina and primarily inflicted regional damage.

To understand why the global fallout from the Greek crisis is more likely to resemble Argentina than Lehman Brothers, let's remember what financial contagion is and how it spreads through the global financial system. Contagion occurs when an asset's value declines so much that banks and other financial institutions that own it are rendered insolvent. Insolvent banks cannot meet their obligations to their partners, which drives these "counterparties," as they're known in the finance world, toward insolvency as well. This is what happened with Lehman Brothers: Its mortgage-backed securities holdings lost so much value that the bank could not cover the debt it owed to the financial firms from whom they had borrowed. The resulting loss of capital in those firms weakened their balance sheets. This cascade of weakness through financial networks was aggravated by uncertainty about who owed what to whom and the consequent inability to evaluate the risk of transactions with any financial institution. As a result, interbank lending and short-term credit markets froze. This is how contagion spreads throughout the dense web of connections that make up global financial markets.

Because these global financial network connections have strengthened dramatically over the past several decades, there is now widespread concern that a crisis that hits anywhere can lead to instability everywhere. What's often overlooked is that how countries are connected -- not just where within the network a crisis originates -- has a dramatic impact on whether a local crisis sparks a global crisis. Lehman Brothers had a dramatic global impact because Lehman operated at the center of the U.S. financial system -- the world's most connected market. Moreover, Lehman Brothers' failure occurred as part of a broader systemic crisis: The five largest U.S. investment banks and hundreds of U.S. commercial banks were reorganized or disappeared and many non-bank institutions, such as mortgage lenders and hedge funds, collapsed. The systemic crisis in the United States spread globally because 80 percent of the countries in the world had placed assets in these institutions in an amount well in excess of their capital. Weakness in major American financial institutions translated directly into weakened balance sheets in financial institutions everywhere.

Jobs for Billionaires - By Joshua E. Keating

An unmanned rocket owned by the private company Space Exploration Technologies launched Tuesday on the first commercial flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by PayPal's Elon Musk, has spent about $1.2 billion to date -- $400 million of it from NASA -- in its bid to develop private space flight into a viable commercial enterprise. It's been a busy couple of weeks for rich guys with outer space ambitions. In late April, a group including the co-founders of Google and film director James Cameron announced the formation of a startup company with plans to one day mine asteroids for platinum.

Space exploration may one day provide the Earth with tangible benefits. In the short-term, at least, SpaceX can help save the U.S. government the $60 million per person it's paying Russia to transport astronauts to the space station, which, as the joke goes, exists so that the now-canceled space shuttle would have somewhere to go. But we couldn't help thinking, as long as Silicon Valley plutocrats are throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars to solve global problems with questionable economic benefits, there are a few pressing Earth-bound ones they might consider.

HELPING STOP CHILDHOOD MALNUTRITION

In its 2012 challenge report, the Copenhagen Consensus Center -- which convenes economists, including several Nobel Prize winers,  to provide cost-benefit analyses of solving various global crises -- ranked efforts to combat childhood malnutrition as its highest priority. (The center is controversial because of its founder Bjorn Lomborg's skepticism about efforts to combat climate change, but its numbers are at least worth considering as a conversation starter.)

According to the center's analysis, a $3 billion investment in interventions to reduce chronic undernutrition in pre-schoolers could reduce it by up to 36 percent in developing countries. In terms of education and health benefits, every dollar spent on combating undernutrition has at least a $30 payoff.

The Candidates - An FP Slide Show

Egypt has produced some good headlines over the few millennia of its existence: There's its rise as the center of Arab and Islamic culture, the building of the pyramids, and even, reportedly, a spat between a pharaoh and a hard-luck local tribe that produced some nasty plagues. But there's one story that has always eluded it: the drama of a competitive presidential election. On May 23, that all ends.

In a culmination of the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, Egyptians are set to go to the polls to elect a new president. The path to this point hasn't been easy: Egypt has struggled through protests against the country's military rulers that devolved into violence, polarizing debates over the role of religion in politics, and even the resurgence of Mubarak's most feared domestic enforcer.

The candidates vying to replace Mubarak are a hodgepodge of Islamists, members of the ancien régime, and even an adherent to the political philosophy of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In this photo essay, acclaimed photojournalist Kate Brooks provides FP readers with an inside look at the front-runners and their entourages on the campaign stump. For the first time in Egypt's history, it's anyone's guess who will come out on top. Let the games begin.

Above, Amr Moussa greets his supporters at a rally.

Kate Brooks for FP

The Good Felool - By David Kenner

Click here for pictures of the Egyptian presidential frontrunners.

BENI SUEF, Egypt ' Amr Moussa stood on a rickety stage, battling the summer heat and feedback from a defective microphone, promising the Egyptian people the world. "We're making a Second Republic, a renaissance for Egypt," he told the audience of several hundred. "It is the time to rebuild the country, to fight poverty and unemployment, which has resulted from mismanagement."

He went on in that vein, ticking off the boxes of socioeconomic development: health care, education, wages. Children played with posters featuring the visage of the former Egyptian foreign minister and Arab League secretary-general and a simple message: "Create jobs."

It was the spectacle, not the speech, that counted. Moussa's campaign bus had been joined by a convoy of honking cars as it entered the town; a makeshift band played on the back of one pickup truck. Moussa's first stop was to the town's mosques, where he prayed briefly among the crush of locals trying to get close to him. Outside one mosque, the crowd thronged around the door in anticipation of his exit, cheering expectantly. A man from the town exited before Moussa and waved to the masses. "Thank you, thank you," he joked. "Yes, I am the prime minister."

It was just one stop in a frenetic campaign that has taken Moussa to seemingly every village and hamlet in Egypt. The night before, Moussa had taken part in Egypt's first-ever presidential debate, which concluded after 2 a.m. His campaign bus left Cairo at 9 a.m., and he was still shaking hands and kissing babies 12 hours later. "He's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ahmed Kamel, his exhausted media advisor, at the end of the day.

Beni Suef, a predominantly rural governorate of approximately 2.6 million people south of Cairo, appeared at first glance to be a strange place for Moussa to stump for votes. It is the home of Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie and has by and large stood behind his political vision. In Egypt's most recent parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood's political wing won a majority of the votes in the governorate, followed closely by the Salafi al-Nour Party.

But there was Moussa -- an emphatically non-Islamist candidate and a consummate establishment man in a country supposedly in revolution -- barnstorming across the governorate. And it is working: Moussa remains the front-runner in the presidential race set to kick off on May 23. A recent poll released by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-linked think tank, placed him at the top of the heap, garnering the support of 31.7 percent of voters, while a Brookings Institution poll had him a close second behind Islamist candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh. If none of the candidates wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the election will move to a runoff between the top two vote-getters on June 16 and 17, where Moussa would likely be in the strongest position to forge a winning coalition.

But what does Moussa's success say about the state of Egypt's politics? The word "revolution" has been thrown about for the past 16 months to describe the upheaval in the country; a victory by the 75-year-old veteran of internecine battles within Hosni Mubarak's regime and the old Arab order suggests something closer to a course correction. Moussa, for better or worse, is not the culmination of anything approaching a revolution.

Many Egyptians recognize this, and resent it. Dissenters trail the crowds of cheering supporters at Moussa's every campaign stop. His earnest speech in Beni Suef was interrupted when a youth of no more than 20 burst into the tent to denounce him as felool -- a derogatory term for "remnants" of the old regime.

Barack O'Romney - By Aaron David Miller

If Barack Obama is reelected, he ought to consider making Mitt Romney his new secretary of state. I propose this far-fetched howler not because I'm trying to get into my own Dumb Idea Hall of Fame, or because white-male secretaries of state seem to be going the way of the dodo at Foggy Bottom (we haven't had one since Warren Christopher departed in 1997), or because I believe deeply in bipartisanship. (Although I do; it's been a long time since we've had a secretary of state who was from the opposing party, and it would be great idea.)

I raise the idea to drive home a broader point. Despite his campaign rhetoric, Romney would be quite comfortable carrying out President Obama's foreign policy because it accords so closely with his own.

And that brings up an extraordinary fact. What has emerged in the second decade after 9/11 is a remarkable consensus among Democrats and Republicans on a core approach to the nation's foreign policy. It's certainly not a perfect alignment. But rarely since the end of the Cold War has there been this level of consensus. Indeed, while Americans may be divided, polarized and dysfunctional about issues closer to home, we are really quite united in how we see the world and what we should do about it.

Ever wondered why foreign policy hasn't figured all that prominently in the 2012 election campaign? Sure, the country is focused on the economy and domestic priorities. And yes, Obama has so far avoided the kind of foreign-policy disasters that would give the Republicans easy free shots. But there's more to it than that: Romney has had a hard time identifying Obama's foreign-policy vulnerabilities because there's just not that much difference between the two.

A post 9/11 consensus is emerging that has bridged the ideological divide of the Bush 43 years. And it's going to be pretty durable.

Paradoxically, both George W. Bush's successes and failures helped to create this new consensus. His tough and largely successful approach to counterterrorism -- specifically, keeping the homeland safe and keeping al Qaeda and its affiliates at bay through use of special forces, drone attacks, aggressive use of intelligence, and more effective cooperation among agencies now forms a virtually unassailable bipartisan consensus. As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign, Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.

And Bush 43's failed policies -- a discretionary war in Iraq and a mismanaged one in Afghanistan -- have had an equally profound effect. These adventures created a counter-reaction against ill-advised military campaigns that is now bipartisan theology as well.

To be sure, there are some differences between Romney and Obama. But with the exception of Republicans taking a softer line on Israel and a tougher one on Russia -- both stances that are unlikely to matter much in terms of actual policy implementation -- there's a much greater convergence.

Yes, in the interests of winning votes, Romney will hone a few choice attacks in the campaign to come: "The president is weak and an apologizer, I'm not!" "The president doesn't believe in American leadership, I do!" These tropes, however, are either meaningless or inaccurate, and aren't likely to resonate much with a foreign policy-fatigued public.

Four key principles drive the new post, post-9/11 consensus:

1. Fix Our Broken House: These days, any sentient politician understands that the key to American power abroad is inextricably linked to the state of our union here at home. Whether or not our leaders are prepared to pay the political price to address these domestic problems is another matter. But the talking points seem pretty similar: Build our nation first, not anyone else's. Watch what you're spending abroad, and focus on the five deadly Ds at home -- debt, deficit, dysfunctional politics, decaying infrastructure, and dependence on Middle East hydrocarbons.

Whether it's a Democratic or Republican president, domestic priorities have set the tone for a retrenchment in America's global footprint for years to come. When it comes to risky foreign-policy initiatives, expect politicians to take a long look in the rear-view mirror first.

Bangkok Blues - By Joshua Kurlantzick

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Bangkok's Democracy Monument, a towering series of spires looking toward the sky, located on the central avenue in the older part of the city, was a lively area for street life. Outdoor vendors selling phat kii maw and other noodle dishes jostled for business with watermelon and jackfruit sellers while yuppies sat at the cafes and fast-food outlets surrounding the monument. Like the events that inspired the monument itself, which memorializes the end of absolute monarchy in the 1930s, Thailand's political system seemed to be settling down.

From the 1930s to the 1990s, Thailand had essentially been ruled by the armed forces, in alliance with the business elite and the royal family, which still wielded enormous power behind the facade of a constitutional monarchy. In 1992, however, with the Cold War over and a more assertive Bangkok middle class no longer willing to tolerate military rule, massive popular demonstrations ousted the military regime and replaced it with a respected civilian government.

Following the military's withdrawal in 1992, many Thais and outside observers thought the country would become a solid democracy. Thailand passed a progressive constitution in 1997, which guaranteed many rights and freedoms, created new national institutions to monitor graft, and strengthened political parties at the expense of the traditional unelected centers of power -- the palace, the military, big business, and the elite civil service. It also set the stage for elections in 2001 that were probably the freest in Thailand's history. Meanwhile, the Thai media utilized its new freedoms, along with new technologies such as the Internet and satellite television, to explore formerly taboo topics like political corruption and labor rights. The Thai Army's leaders vowed that they would respect civilian control and never engage in politics again. In its 1999 report, the international monitoring organization Freedom House ranked Thailand a "free" country -- one of only a handful of Asian countries receiving this designation.

Over the past six years, however, Democracy Monument and the area around it have come to look far different. As protests and riots have incessantly plagued the Thai capital, outbreaks of violence, and military repression of demonstrations, around the monument have, at times, left dead bodies lying just in front of it, blood splattered on the nearby pavement, and angry demonstrators armed with Molotov cocktails laying waste to the surrounding streets. An informal shrine has sprung up in a place where the brains of one protester were splashed after security forces shot him two years ago. Meanwhile, all the political instability has had a serious long-term impact on Thailand's economy, though in the short term the economy has struggled through. Tourism is critical to the Thai economy, and the violence scared off visitors. Many foreign investors are rethinking their plans for Thailand as well.

If Thailand can collapse, it suggests that nearly any developing country's transition is less secure than it often appears. Since 2006, Thailand, once a poster child for democratization in the developing world, has undergone perhaps the most rapid and severest democratic regression in the entire world -- despite having achieved middle-income status and, prior to the reversal, having held multiple contested elections. Now Thailand's never-ending cycle of street protest, with the middle class and the poor pitted against each other in a fight for political power, paralyzes policymaking, hinders economic growth, and deters investment at a time when the country is losing competitiveness compared with neighbors like Vietnam. The military has retaken enormous political power and constantly threatens another coup, while draconian new media laws have clamped down on a press and blogosphere that were once the most freewheeling in Asia. "It's only going to get worse from here now," one Thai official told me in December. "Either another coup or all-out war in the streets."

How could this have happened? How did one of the world's most promising democracies melt down so quickly? And what does Thailand's regression tell us about the strength -- or lack thereof -- of democracy in many developing countries? Indeed, Thailand suffers from several of the problems that have plagued other emerging democracies, such as Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, and Venezuela, and have led to their regression over the past five years -- a period that monitoring groups like Freedom House have marked as a global rollback of democracy.

Thailand's meltdown actually started a decade ago. In 2001, Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire populist former telecommunications tycoon, was elected prime minister, primarily by the country's poorest citizens. Despite his goofy, gap-toothed smile, Thaksin was a savvy, mercurial, and powerful speaker, probably the best in Thai history, and he was also an Oscar-quality actor, capable of turning on his "listening mode" at any meeting, just as easily as he could scream at underlings.

Thailand's nascent judicial and bureaucratic institutions were too weak to control Thaksin's ambitions. He took advantage of his popularity to neuter the news media, undermine the independence of the judiciary, and viciously punish political opponents. When Thaksin was charged, early in his tenure, with concealing assets, he was acquitted by Thailand's top court in a very close decision. Following the verdict, several justices alleged that they had faced intense pressure from Thaksin's allies to acquit him.

Like other elected autocrats including Russia's Vladimir Putin, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and Thaksin's friend, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Thaksin viewed democracy as merely a series of regular votes, after which the victor could use his electoral victories to crush all other challengers. "Thaksin was not a democrat. He might have held votes, but he didn't care at all about anything else that makes a democracy," said Surapong Jayanama, a longtime Thai official and diplomat. Thailand's media increasingly became more servile, and according to Human Rights Watch, Thaksin launched a "war on drugs" (Thailand has a major methamphetamine problem) that provided a convenient pretext for attacks on his opponents and that wound up with some 2,500 dead, often killed in staged shootouts or other suspicious encounters.

Still, Thaksin remained extremely popular among the Thai poor, the majority of voters in one of Asia's most unequal countries. Before him, no candidate had ever directly tried to empower the poor or provide them with voter education. Most of Thailand's elitist politicians had traditionally ignored or diluted the votes of the poor by vote-rigging and vote-buying, installing cabinets dominated by a small group of Bangkok-based technocrats.

Once Upon a Time in Bangkok

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Once Upon a Time in Bangkok - An FP Slideshow

In the 1980s, an Asian investment boom brought multinational corporations flooding into Bangkok, creating the bustling hyper-modern city that pulsates with tourists and businessmen alike today. With a population larger than New York City, Bangkok is now far and away the most densely populated city in Thailand -- nearly a third of the country's 65 million citizens live in the metro region. But it wasn't always like this: The city started out as a somewhat sleepy trading post, along the Chao Prya river. It remained an outpost until the 18th century, when what is now known as Bangkok became the country's capital city. Here's a look back at the metropolis 100 years ago, when it was experiencing its first population explosion and serving as neutral territory between the French and British colonial empires -- a time when most people traveled through the city by rickshaw, and the city's skyline was still broken only by Buddhist temples.

Above, this 1900 floating dock was erected for the royal rite of passage called "Teaching the Prince How to Swim," marking the prince's passage into puberty. During the ritual, the prince descended into the river while Brahmin priests chanted.

Curator: Steve Van Beek