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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
139061
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| Summary/Abstract |
ZEMITHANG, India — My friends and I had gone as far as we could toward the border with China. We were tracing, in reverse, the Dalai Lama’s path into India from Chinese-occupied Tibet in March 1959. We stopped in this village, on a rise in the road overlooking a river in the far western corner of India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, to look for anyone old enough to remember the Dalai Lama passing through on his way into exile.
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| 2 |
ID:
139064
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| Summary/Abstract |
The publication of French literary star Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Soumission, was bound to create sensation and scandal, in any case. But the fact that the book was published on the very day that Islamic terrorists burst into the Parisian offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and massacred a large part of the staff added a new and chilling dimension to the release. The soumission or “submission” of the book’s title is just the literal translation of the Arabic word islam , and the book is about precisely the “submission” of France to Islamic rule—or, at any rate, to the government of an Islamic party—in the not-so-distant future of 2022.
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| 3 |
ID:
139063
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In September 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that he could, at will, occupy any Eastern European capital in two days. This apparently spontaneous utterance reveals, probably more than Russia’s new official defense doctrine, Moscow’s true assessment of NATO’s capabilities, cohesion, and will to resist. In an echo of Soviet tactics, it also reflects Putin’s reflexive recourse to intimidation—e.g., unwarranted boasting about Russian military capabilities and intentions—as a negotiating strategy. In 2014 alone, Moscow repeatedly threatened the Baltic and Nordic states and civilian airliners, heightened intelligence penetration, deployed unprecedented military forces against those states, intensified overflights and submarine reconnaissance, mobilized nuclear forces and threats, deployed nuclear-capable forces in Kaliningrad, menaced Moldova, and openly violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987. Russian officials openly declared that the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty of 1989 was dead, and continued a large-scale comprehensive defense buildup in areas ranging from space and counter-space to submarine and ground forces as well as nuclear forces. Seeing as Norway and Estonia’s defense ministers, in separate 2014 speeches in Washington, both indicated that Russia already enjoyed superiority in the Baltic region, these gestures looked like overkill on Putin’s part, to put it mildly.
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| 4 |
ID:
139062
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In its 2011 annual survey, the Center for Army Leadership asked soldiers to respond to a seemingly innocuous statement: “The Army is headed in the right direction to prepare for the challenges of the next 10 years.” Only 26 percent of those on active duty agreed—an all-time low in the history of this survey. The report caused ripples well beyond the Army community. News outlets—from NBC News to the Boston Globe—ran stories about the Army’s crisis of confidence and overall military morale.
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| 5 |
ID:
139060
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| Summary/Abstract |
Nearly seven decades ago, George F. Kennan authored a seminal article that argued for a policy of containment to combat the spread of Soviet influence. Kennan’s essay came at a time when the Soviet Union, a frenemy to the West during World War II, was becoming increasingly hostile and expansionist in the postwar era. In a devastated Europe, Joseph Stalin was methodically installing puppet regimes in countries to his west. Communism was on the march. The American public saw an increasing threat but had little appetite for further military conflict after the end of years of global war.
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| 6 |
ID:
139057
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| Summary/Abstract |
In reacting to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine in early 2014, the US government did not call the Sixth Fleet into action; it did not ban all exports to Russia; it did not stop all cultural and educational exchanges. Rather, key elites close to “a senior Russian government official”—President Vladimir Putin—were targeted with asset seizures and visa bans.
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| 7 |
ID:
139058
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The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not have problems with other creeds or sects,” then Prince (now King) Salman claimed in a conversation with outgoing US Ambassador James C. Oberwetter in March 2007. Salman went on to stress: “Terrorism and fanaticism have done more harm to Islam than anything else.” This is the party line of the House of Saud—that, in the words of its last king, Abdullah, Saudi Arabia stands “in the face of those trying to hijack Islam and present it to the world as a religion of extremism, hatred, and terrorism.” Such statements are meant to reassure, but they ring hollow in the face of evidence that the roots and spread of violent Sunni jihad lead back to Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi-centered clerical establishment.
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| 8 |
ID:
139059
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What is the real fulcrum of China’s strength?” a popular Chinese website asked in 2009. There was a one-word answer: “Population!” Citizens of the world’s most populous state take pride in their great numbers, and the country is, not surprisingly, filled with population determinists. “More people means more power,” wrote a poster named “Fang Feng” on the “Strong Country Forum” of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily. “This is the truth.
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| 9 |
ID:
139056
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By the time Gordon Brown, Britain’s former Labor prime minister, arrived at the school in Nottingham where he was scheduled to speak, he was an hour late and the audience had dwindled to 130 people. Brown’s message was “Don’t lose hope.” He said Nelson Mandela once told him of a painting called Hope that he had kept on the wall of his prison cell in South Africa. It showed a girl wearing a blindfold, sitting on a globe trying to play a harp with all its strings broken. “[Mandela] was saying, even in a situation that seems hopeless, there is always hope,” Brown told his audience. “The Labor movement was built on hope.”
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