An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

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Forget about all the cookie-cutter books that explain how to make money in China. Let’s take a look at how to lose money in China.
Mr. China: A Memoir
In the early 1990s, British businessman Clissold–with a passing knowledge of China and of Mandarin–found himself the point man between a group of Wall Street bankers with hundreds [...]

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For a decade, metallurgists studying the hulk of the Titanic have argued that the storied ocean liner went down quickly after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died.
Now a team of scientists has moved into [...]

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Now, a young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in “The Second World” that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — “a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.” The three are the United States, the European Union and China. The [...]

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ON THE face of it, these two books are about the same thing: the great trends in geopolitics as the economic power of Asia grows and as the world grimaces at America in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Yet they could hardly be more different. Parag Khanna’s is a long, complicated book on the [...]

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It is hardly a coincidence, he suggests, that ancient Athens found itself doing battle with the Persian tyranny of Xerxes, while the modern Western world faces a stand-off with the mullahs’ Iran. In his view of history, these are simply related chapters in a single narrative: the contest between liberal and enlightened societies whose locus [...]

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Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of silence, revealing some of the science and spying that went into the doomsday preparations.
A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The [...]

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By the third week of January this year, we heard Russia announce that it would not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in battle, that it would resume this May parading tanks and missiles through Red Square in the Soviet fashion, that it would reestablish the application of double jeopardy in criminal [...]

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To commentators such as Thomas Friedman, today’s globalization is a largely technological phenomenon. Once learned, new technologies are typically not forgotten, which is why globalization can seem an irresistible force, destined to bind us ever more tightly together for the foreseeable future. History, however, suggests that globalization is as much a political as a technological [...]

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This essay is adapted from his book, “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,” to be published by Random House in March.
It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has [...]

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Why is the Middle East so at odds with modern life, laggard in everything from literacy to standard of living, from military prowess to political development?
A profound new book by Philip Carl Salzman, professor at McGill University, with the deceptively plain title Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Prometheus), offers a bold and original [...]

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From an isolationist nation at the end of World war One, the US today has bases in over ninety countries. No other nation has been able to project military power as the US does today. But is such an involvement sustainable? Despite its might, the US is shrinking in terms of population and economic power [...]

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Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein reports that a book about to be published alleges that “Tariq Rauf, the top U.N. official responsible for monitoring the clandestine nuclear programs of Iran and Pakistan is a Russian spy” who “hated America.”
Tariq Rauf, 54, a Pakistani-born Canadian who is chief of verification and security-policy coordination at the International Atomic [...]

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New combat videogame depicts a world at war over rapidly dwindling crude supplies. But what’s the message players walk away with?
On a futuristic battlefield littered with broken oil wells, burnt-out electric cars and dilapidated wind turbines, you are leading crack military unit on a mission to secure the world’s last remaining oil supplies.
Your enemies are [...]

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In the past nine years, Russian foreign policy has been examined several times in these pages.[1] At no other time, however, has its direction been as troubling as it is today. To understand the causes of this disturbing evolution and to gauge its future course, the changes have to be examined in the context of [...]

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‘Taiwan’s Security: History and Prospects’ looks at how Taiwanese land, air and sea defenses and offensive strategies stack up against the competition
In Taiwan’s Security: History and Prospects, US Navy veteran Bernard Cole (unrelated to this reviewer) offers an unusually in-depth assessment of the many facets of Taiwan’s defense establishment. While many publications have approached the [...]

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In the last days of 2007, Moscow made several purposeful steps that barely registered in the West, where the Christmas break was already well underway. The first step was the delivery of fuel elements to the nearly completed nuclear power station in Bushehr, which could start the reactor perhaps as early as mid-2008 (Rossiiskaya [...]

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Think of Latin America and odds are you will think, in no particular order, of the Amazon, the Andes, dictators in sunglasses, women in bowler hats, Maradona, economic crises, salsa, tango and tropical sunshine.
Which is to say, odds are you do not think of it often. There are, after all, more pressing parts of the [...]

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For example, the most recent estimate of Chinese missiles now opposite Taiwan is 1,000. This cold fact has drawn the attention of the Pentagon, Tokyo, and Taipei.
Those 1,000 missiles are just about the right number to start and win a war over Taiwan.
China has also introduced a brand new air-to-air missile that should be operational [...]

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Exposing a one-man force for nuclear proliferation.
Book in a nutshell: Husband-and- wife journalists retrace the secretive dealings and ultimate downfall of arms dealer Abdul Qadeer Khan, whose stock in trade was offering up the makings for nuclear weapons to the world’s most tyrannical regimes.
The authors revisit Khan’s efforts to distribute the worst weapons of mass [...]

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Man of the year, or scandal of the decade?
Now Vladimir Putin is Time’s “Person of the Year” for 2007: not an honour, the magazine insists, but just a recognition of “bold, earth-changing leadership”. Even so, that is hardly future-proof. Russia’s still-shaky economy and disastrous demographics mean that rather than being the harbinger of Russia’s stability-based [...]

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