Out of the Bretton Woods

When China proposed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in late 2013, it hoped to offer a regional alternative to the multilateral institutions of the Bretton Woods system that left Asia underrepresented. When 58 member nations bucked Washington’s warnings and joined the bank this year, including allies of the United States and G–7 stalwarts such as France, Germany, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, China realized that it had a potential vanguard for an alternative economic world order.

The Company Getting Rich Off the ISIS War

For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe. For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.

Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

India-Pakistan Clashes in Kashmir

Image Credit: Jammu and Kashmir via OlegD / Shutterstock.com

July was a busy month for India-Pakistan relations. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Ufa, Russia, with the two agreeing that their respective national security advisors would meet to discuss ways to combat terrorism.

How olive oil explains Greece’s problems

The hills of Kalamata, on the southern coast of Greece's Peloponnese peninsula, produce some of the best olives in the world. When pressed, they produce an oil that is almost fluorescent green and sometimes described as "liquid gold."

EPA/ALI ALI

But after much of that oil is pressed in Greek processing facilities, tanker trucks come to take it straight to the sea. In 2012, 60 percent of Greece's olive oil output was shipped to Italy. There, it is packaged in Italian bottles with Italian labels, and then sent around the world. And most of the profits go back to Italy -- according to consultancy McKinsey, Italy captures an extra 50 percent premium on the price of Greek oil.

Το «Ημερολόγιο» ενός μικρού ανδρός

Ο δικτάτορας Μεταξάς εν μέσω των οργανωμένων της ΕΟΝ. Το «Ημερολόγιό» του είναι αποκαλυπτικό για την προσωπικότητά του

Εβδομήντα εννιά χρόνια από την κήρυξή της, η δικτατορία της 4ης Αυγούστου εξακολουθεί να προσφέρει υλικό σε ιστορικούς και πολιτικούς αναλυτές. Μάλιστα εδώ και μερικά χρόνια έχει επιχειρηθεί από ένα ρεύμα ιστορικής αναθεώρησης ακόμα και μια άτυπη «αποκατάσταση» της δικτατορίας, μέσα από ποικίλους συλλογισμούς και αναφορές. Για την ακρίβεια είναι ο ίδιος ο δικτάτορας Ιωάννης Μεταξάς ο οποίος αντιμετωπίζεται από μερίδα ιστορικών ερευνητών αλλά και μέσων ενημέρωσης ως σημαντικός «πολιτικός άνδρας», με αξιόλογη δράση και ακόμα πιο αξιοπρόσεκτη πολιτική σκέψη.

Nuclear Industry Future Far From Clear

My uncle was 17 years old, proud of his martial Prussian heritage, when he joined the U.S. Marines, just in time to make the landing on Guadalcanal. He made it through that encounter, was later wounded on Okinawa, recovered, and was training for the invasion of the Japanese mainland when Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in atomic flames. When we buried him a few years ago, the Marine Honor Guard spokesman on hand said that most of the 500,000 Purple Hearts minted for the invasion were still in inventory. That is fortunate for Americans, though it meant woes a thousand fold had come raining down upon the Land of the Rising Sun.

Greece: The Need for a More Collaborative and Flexible Response on Migrants

Lesvos, a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea, is currently one of the most popular arrival points for migrants not only in Greece but in Europe. Roughly half of migrants arriving in Greece so far this year have come to Lesvos, which at some points is located less than 10 kilometers from the Turkish coast. Approximately 1,000 migrants have been arriving on the shores of Lesvos each day. These are record numbers for the island of 86,000 people.

Turkey Goes to War

One month ago, Abu Mohammed al-Halabi painted a dismal picture of his fighters’ struggles against the Islamic State along a crucial geographical corridor north of the Syrian city of Aleppo. The jihadis had killed three of his men in a nighttime ambush in mid-June while using night-vision goggles more advanced than anything his group possessed. His brigade had been fighting for 10 days straight without any injection of money or equipment. If this continued for another week, the beleaguered rebel commander told Foreign Policy, “anything could happen” — even a complete collapse of rebel lines.

Who’s Nexit?

Which will be the next eurozone domino to fall? With Greece enjoying a temporary lull in its apparently permanent crisis, we can take a moment to look around its neighborhood at other candidates for trouble. There are several — and the euro’s future looks far from bright.

Greece ran into trouble mainly because it should never have been in the eurozone in the first place. Its governments couldn’t balance their budgets, and its economic cycle was far out of sync with those of the eurozone’s leading lights. When Germany grew, Greece shrank, and vice versa. Using the same monetary policy in both countries made no sense at all.

Quantum Geopolitics

Forecasting the shape the world will take in several years or decades is an audacious undertaking. There are no images to observe or precise data points to anchor us. We can only create a picture, and a fuzzy one at best. This is, after all, our basic human empirical instinct: to draw effortlessly from the vivid imagery of our present world and past experiences while we squint and hesitate before faint, blobby images of the future.