Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

Women in 22nd-century sovereign America are expected to be seen and not heard. Caitriona Hayden did not get that memo. As she struggles to make her way in the world after her powerful uncle dies, being "seen" is the least of Cait's problems.

Trump’s critics miss that he has hired the right people and gotten the big picture of U.S. foreign policy right.

The New Rochelle High School team in suburban New York is like many across the country: a source of civic pride, a manhood workshop for a revered coach, and an emotional proving ground for boys of widely different backgrounds. In the fall of 2014, New Rochelle's season unfolded alongside watershed NFL head injury revelations and domestic abuse cases (remember Ray Rice?) as well as fatalities on nearby fields. The dramatic story of that season, for players, parents and coaches, underscores fundamental questions.

China is part of the solution when it comes to North Korea, but, through its continued material support of the Kim regime, it is also part of the problem.

GB Road, New Delhi’s red-light district, is one of India’s largest, with an estimated 5,000 sex workers living in 96 brothels. It is also one of the nation’s oldest, having been established by the British in the 1930s.

Each U.S. president inherits history’s most robust system for gaining insight into the capabilities and intentions of other powers. A vital part of this national security infrastructure is the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, which contains the nation’s most sensitive intelligence reporting and analysis. For more than 50 years, the U.S. intelligence community has delivered this top-secret book to the commander in chief every working day.

What happened to Recep Tayyip Erdogan? The Turkish president came to power in 2003 promising economic and political liberalization. But under his rule, Turkey has instead moved in a profoundly illiberal, authoritarian direction - although not toward repressive Islamism, which some feared was Erdogan’s true agenda. Rather, Erdogan has become something more akin to a traditional Middle Eastern strongman: consolidating personal power, purging rivals, and suppressing dissent.

When the anti-austerity party Syriza came to power in Greece in January 2015, Cornel Ban and I wrote in a Foreign Affairs article that, at some point, Europe was bound to face an Alexis Tsipras, the party’s leader and Greek prime minister, “because there’s only so long you can ask people to vote for impoverishment today based on promises of a better tomorrow that never arrives.”

This week, Ethiopia is commemorating its national day with an exhibition celebrating the country’s economic progress. More than 140 companies - some state-owned, some private - have set up displays in Millennium Hall, a conference center in Addis Ababa’s upscale Bole neighborhood.

In 2016, as President Robert Mugabe celebrates his 92nd birthday and 36th year in power, Zimbabwe stands on the brink of another meltdown. The country’s current economic insecurity and political conflict are reminiscent of 2000-2008, when hyperinflation and electoral violence were rife. This time, however, the stakes are even higher as a floundering authoritarian regime faces a leadership succession with little clear guidance on how to navigate the transition.

How to marginalize the Islamic State online.

According to conventional wisdom, the deterioration of US-Israeli relations is the result of personal animosity between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama. But ill-will is more of a symptom than a cause. In fact, the increased friction reflects a new Israeli grand strategy. Rather than seeking to minimize differences with the United States over Iran and Palestine, as previous Israeli governments had done, Netanyahu has worked to diversify Israel's international partnerships, cultivating new friends - from India to China to Saudi Arabia - so that Israel is less dependent on the United States.

Foreign media is trickling in to North Korea, making its people increasingly aware of the gap between Pyongyang’s propaganda and reality. In the short term, the regime is still well able to repress subversion, but this new awareness could be a long-term threat. Helping the flow of outside information may be the best way to help North Korea change from within.

Europe currently finds itself in the throes of its worst political crisis since World War II. Across the continent, traditional political parties have lost their appeal as populist, Euroskeptical movements have attracted widespread support. Hopes for European unity seem to grow dimmer by the day. The euro crisis has exposed deep fault lines between Germany and debt-ridden southern European states, including Greece and Portugal.

In 1996, Ehud Barak, who was then Israel’s foreign minister and would later serve as prime minister, characterized Israel as “a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle.” Twenty years later, as political turmoil and violence engulf the Middle East, that harsh metaphor captures better than ever the way most Israelis see their country and its place in the region. Their standard of living has never been higher. Their country’s economy is robust, and Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit remains the envy of the world.

How should one judge a president’s handling of foreign policy?

Austin joins Dallas and Houston in Akashic's deep dive into the Lone Star State's darkest dimensions. Featuring brand-new stories by: Gabino Iglesias, Ace Atkins, Amanda Moore, Jeff Abbott, Scott Montgomery, Richard Z. Santos, Alexandra Burt, Lee Thomas, Miriam Kuznets, Jacob Grovey, Chaitali Sen, Molly Odintz, Amy Gentry, and Andrew Hilbert.

The Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5 million leaked documents belonging to the law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama, has implicated dozens of world leaders and celebrities in offshore banking and tax evasion. And yet these revelations are small when compared to the actual size of global financial crime. Panama, after all, is only one of more than 90 financial secrecy jurisdictions around the world today.

The next administration will take the reins of American foreign policy in a world that is more complex than at any point in our modern history, including the twilight of the Cold War and the years that followed the 9/11 attacks. But it is also the case that despite the proliferation of threats and challenges - some old, some new - by almost any measure, we are stronger and more secure today than when President Barack Obama and I took office in January 2009.

How should politicians and policymakers respond to economic inequality? A new collection of essays offers some answers, but much work still needs to be done to turn academic ideas into practical proposals.