This week, yet again, the Ukraine crisis continued to dominate the news. Russia consolidated its hold on Crimea while the U.S., Europe and Japan -- the revived G-7 -- sought to isolate Vladimir Putin with sanctions even as the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil and South Africa pointedly said they would not go along with any such moves in the G-20.
In The WorldPost, Solidarity co-founder Adam Michnik from Poland and former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer argue that the West must stand up to Putin's "extortion" at gunpoint. Former German Environment Minister Jurgen Trittin writes that Germany's exemplary shift toward renewable energy could free it from dependence on "Putin's gas."
Jacques Attali , founding president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, warns that Europe was repeating the mistake it made in 1919 when the Versailles Treaty punished Germany for its role in WWI, only to see it return from isolation in the ferocious backlash of Hitlerism. Mohamed El-Erian worries that weakening Russia's economy could push the continent back into recession since 40 percent of Russian trade is with Europe.
Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing observes that China's leaders are acutely cautious in their own foreign policy not to fall into the "Thucydides trap" of conflict between emerging and established powers as has happened in the Ukraine.
Turning to Asia, strategic analyst Robert Kaplan says in an interview with The WorldPost that we are facing "the end of a stable Pacific" as rival nationalisms engage in a new arms race. World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati outlines a "new urbanization" approach for China that is "inclusive and sustainable." Jehangir Pocha writes from New Delhi that, as new elections approach, the world's largest democracy is asking "what went wrong" on its derailed path toward prosperity.
In an exclusive interview with The WorldPost, Chelsea Clinton speaks to young people disillusioned with electoral politics, making a case for platforms of networked direct action beyond politics to make change. The WorldPost editor Nathan Gardels reviews a seminal new book by Thomas Piketty, "Capital in the 21st Century," that identifies the key dynamic of capitalism that generates growing inequality.
Finally, Matt Sheehan, The WorldPost China correspondent, reports in an eye-opening video on daily life in Beijing. Sophia Jones reports from the Turkish-Syrian border on the desperation that leads young men to join the extremist rebels in Syria.
WHO WE AREEDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Nicholas Sabloff is the Executive International Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's 10 international editions. Eline Gordts and Ryan Craggs are HuffPost's World News Editors.
CORRESPONDENTS: Max Rosenthal in Beirut; Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy) and Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review). Katherine Keating (One-On-One) and Jehangir Pocha (NewsX India) .
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, will be our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from Massivechangenetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder,Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.