The World

Yet even with these two conflicts and a number of lesser ones, what took place in Asia since World War II surely qualifies as a miracle. Life expectancy across the region rose from forty-eight years in 1960 to seventy-five half a century later. Robust democracies took root over time in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Arguably the greatest miracle,

the cyber domain can be a weapon of the weak, because it is low cost and can cause a tremendous amount of damage to a militarily superior enemy. For instance, North Korea, which by all measures is one of the most impoverished countries in the world, also has one of the most sophisticated cyber arsenals. Depending on the targets selected and their e

back to the late eighteenth century. There was the long, slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, with its base for much of its existence in present-day Istanbul and which over some five centuries stretched over a good deal of what today constitutes the Middle East, North Africa, southeast Europe, and parts of Asia. The second trend was the emergence of

The UN Security Council is of little relevance to most of the world’s conflicts, and international arrangements have failed to contend with the challenges associated with globalization. The world has put itself on the record as against genocide and has asserted a right to intervene when governments fail to live up to the responsibility to protect t

India and Pakistan now represent two of the world’s nine nuclear weapon states. India first tested a nuclear device in 1974, in part as a response to China’s development of nuclear weapons. India and China fought a short war in 1962 that China won easily, and the two continue to view each other warily. The border between them remains in dispute, de

By contrast, much of Western Europe and parts of Asia have an elderly bulge; in Asia, less than 25 percent of the population is under fifteen and nearly 10 percent is sixty-five and over. (Some 27 percent of Japanese people are over sixty-five.) This increases the burden on those who are of working age (because they need to care for many others) an

Around the world, political opposition to pricing carbon has been intense. Disagreements such as these mean that international efforts, begun in earnest in 1995, are far from achieving necessary action. Instead, the world seems to have agreed for the time being on a path in which individual governments set their own goals (“nationally determined co

Sovereign states and their governments are not the only pieces on the chessboard in the international system. There are also corporations, nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace, foundations, members of the media, religious authorities, governors and mayors, and regional and global organ

All this was at a time when the world’s population was on the order of 1.5 billion, roughly one-fifth of what it is today. You would need to multiply each of these statistics by five in order to come up with a figure that would represent proportionate costs were an event of this magnitude to happen now.