The trial run of China's new "Harmony Express," the world's fastest train, took place on virtually the same day recently as the trial of human rights activist Liu Xiaobo. While the Harmony Express streaked from Guangzhou to Wuhan in less than three hours, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years...

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. He sat down with me last week to discuss his new novel Museum of Innocence as well as the current political situation in Turkey and the controversy over its entry into the European Union.

Nathan Gardels: Inserting...

November 9 will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led Francis
Fukuyama to famously declare "the end of history" in an essay in the National Interest and later in a book titled The End of History and the Last Man.

Twenty years on,...

At last, talks between the West and Iran over its nuclear program may be getting somewhere as negotiators sit down in Vienna. After the dramatic revelation of Iran's secret Qom enrichment plant at the G-20 summit in a joint appearance by President Obama, British Prime Minister Brown and French President...

Inside the Obama administration, intense debate goes on about a troop surge in Afghanistan and whether the real threat is the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Some senior advisers fully aware of the risk of quagmire nonetheless have concluded that to allow a Taliban victory in Afghanistan will amount to a...

The last time the Democrats ran a war, it was "Madeleine's war" when we bombed Serbia. For the Global Viewpoint Network, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright weighs in on Obama's deliberations on Afghanistan. Here is an excerpt:

Nathan Gardels: A big debate is raging in the...

In his explosive new novel, Right of Return -- not yet published in English -- the celebrated Dutch novelist Leon de Winter breaks a taboo it is very hard imagining anyone I know in mostly politically-correct American Jewry breaching. Through the critical device of fiction, he sees the once utopian...

Last week, Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) sent a letter to the new prime minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama, welcoming his recent essay on globalization, saying that Europe's and Japan's visions were "converging." Hatoyama had criticized U.S.-led "market fundamentalism"...

I've been centrally embroiled in a fascinating controversy involving an essay published in a Japanese magazine by Yukio Hatoyama, the soon-to-be prime minister of Japan, that caused a big stir when excerpts were published abroad, especially in the United States, which in turn caused a bigger stir back in Japan....

As President Obama ponders the assessment of General McChyrstal over what to do next in Afghanistan, the pressure is on for a new "surge" of troops to "clear, hold and build" contested
areas long enough for some kind of effective governance and security from Kabul to take hold.
...

As the G-2 "strategic dialogue" between the US and China gets underway in Washington, I talked
with economic historian Niall Ferguson for the Global Viewpoint Network. Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. His most recent book...

California's fiscal crisis says as much about the state of the American Dream as it does about the state of California's economy. And it is related in a fundamental way to the sub-prime mortgage/Wall Street meltdown that has brought the country to its knees over the past year.

De-leveraging...

In light of the massive cyberattacks this week on targets from the Pentagon to the New York Stock Exchange to the National Security Agency, the following conversation with one of America's top spymasters, Mike McConnell, is very interesting indeed.

Mike McConnell was Director of National Intelligence, the supreme authority...

ISTANBUL -- The effort to forge new forms of non-Western modernity in the Muslim world has pushed Iran into bloody civil strife while Turkey swirls with persistent rumors of military plots against the Islamist-rooted government. The great historical question is whether, at the end of the day, Iran will look...

John Bolton, a leading neo-conservative official during the Bush administration, is a former U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. His latest book is Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad. He...

Earlier this week, the surprising new director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, eight-term Congressman and former Clinton White House chief of staff, was back in California to tour the high-tech satellite and missile-industrial complex of southern California. He took a lunch break to talk with the Pacific Council on International...

One of the more momentous power shifts in the last 500 years is taking place as we sift through the debris of America's busted credit bubble. The dominance of the West built up across those centuries is now yielding to the East. The latest sign of this shift is that...

ISTANBUL - "If we can show that a big Muslim nation can modernize itself with the help of friends," former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has argued on behalf of Turkey's admission to the European Union, "it demonstrates that a strong civil society, equal rights for men and women, the...

The G-20 Summit in London on April 2 marks a major power shift from the former reign of the G-7 as the executive committee of globalization. It institutionally codifies the "rise of the rest" in global governance.

In this, as in other aspects of foreign affairs, President Barack Obama is...

Of course, I agree with my passionate friend, Bernard-Henri Levy, who writes elsewhere on this page that Gaza cannot be allowed to become an "advance base for total war against Israel."

But for the current Israeli government to think it can prevent that by blowing up the whole of...