Uzbekistan’s rules for buying and selling foreign currencies changed in early February. President Islam Karimov approved a proposal by the Central Bank of Uzbekistan with the decree “Measures on the Further Liberalization of the Procedure for Selling Foreign Currency to…

The media understand current events in Mali in the following terms. First of all, the political situation in Africa is extremely complicated, state systems are weak, and the borders between countries were arbitrarily determined by the former colonial powers. They…

Something momentous happened with North Korea’s space program on December 12, 2012: An Unha-3 (“Milky Way-3”) rocket successfully launched a Kwanmenson-3 (“Bright Star-3”) artificial earth satellite into orbit using a modified three-stage Taepodong-2 ballistic missile as the launch vehicle. A…

Some conclusions. I make no claim to cover China’s problems completely in this article. Nevertheless, the issues I discuss allow us to draw some conclusions and better understand China’s prospects for the near future. China’s main problem can be described…

Problems of political stability § 1.  China’s chief domestic political stability problem is its ethnic heterogeneity. Unlike the European Union, however, China has a core population — the Han Chinese. This buttresses China’s national identity. What are China’s leaders doing…

Military-strategic issues. China’s military-strategic objectives derive from the many needs of its foreign trade and the foreign policy issues that are related to those activities. What does the relationship between military power, foreign trade and foreign policy look like in…

Foreign policy problems.  China’s main foreign policy problem is that no threat nation wants to reduce it to a pathetic and weak condition. Its threat nations are not evil; they are simply pursuing their own advantages, both economic and political.…

“An island economy.”  With each year that passes, China’s economy comes more and more to resemble that of an “Island state,” i.e., an economic system with a near critical dependence on importing raw materials. Japan and South Korea can be…