We are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. We get countless e-mail admonitions: “Please consider the environment before printing.” Indeed, environmentalism was born with a call to preserve the forests.
Competition for strategic natural resources—including water, mineral ores and fossil fuels—has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. But now that competition has intensified, as it encompasses virtually all of Asia where growing populations and rapid economic development over the last three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.
The election of the first non-European pope is long overdue. After all, Pope Francis’ native region, Latin America, is currently home to nearly half (44 percent) of the world’s Catholics. But the Catholic Church is increasingly losing out to Protestant competition there and elsewhere.
Hamas, the militant political movement that has ruled Gaza since 2007, has emerged from the latest round of fighting with Israel with its regional status significantly enhanced. At the same time, the movement faces new questions about its ability to take advantage of the diplomatic opportunities that it has gained.
North Korea’s launch of a long-range missile in mid-December was followed by a flurry of global condemnation that was almost comical in its predictability and impotence. But the launch underscored a larger reality that can no longer be ignored: the world has entered a second nuclear age. The atomic bomb has returned for a second act, a post-Cold War encore. This larger pattern needs to be understood if it is to be managed.
If we were hoping for peace in our time, 2012 did not deliver it. Conflict grew ever bloodier in Syria, continued to grind on in Afghanistan, and flared up periodically in West, Central and East Africa. There were multiple episodes of ethnic, sectarian, and politically motivated violence in Burma (Myanmar), South Asia, and around the Middle East. Tensions between China and its neighbors have escalated in the South China Sea, and between China and Japan in the East China Sea. Concerns about North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs remain unresolved.
TOKYO—The Unha-3 rocket launched from Sohae in North Korea on the morning of Dec. 12 passed through Japanese air space over the island of Okinawa 12 minutes later, and crashed into the Pacific Ocean roughly 300 kilometers east of the Philippines. The launch could be considered a mild surprise, because South Korean intelligence sources had suggested that it had been canceled.
LONDON—Thirty years ago, the Cold War was at its height and the United Kingdom had just clawed its way out of recession. Perhaps those factors explain why, this month in 1982, when 119 government delegations chose to sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), the UK was not among them. [...]
With its presidential election over, the United States can finally take a breather from campaign politics, at least for a while. But an uncomfortable question lingers: How is it possible for the world’s most powerful country and its oldest continuous democracy to exhibit a state of political discourse that is more reminiscent of a failed African state?
Last January, China’s environmental authorities barely averted the contamination of nearly three million people’s drinking water after a mining company dumped cadmium—a toxic heavy metal used in the manufacture of batteries, paint, solder, and solar cells—into the Longjiang River. To stop the contamination from spreading, the local fire department had to add significant quantities of dissolved aluminum chloride, which binds to cadmium and settles on the river bottom. The toxic sediment will eventually be dredged.
It is difficult for me, as an advocate against rape and other forms of violence against women, to fathom the laziness and willful ignorance that characterize so much of the media coverage of the sexual-assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. To report that we are simply witnessing Swedish justice at work, one must be committed to doing no research—not even the bare minimum of picking up a phone. In fact, we are witnessing a bizarre aberration in the context of Sweden’s treatment of sex crimes—a case that exposes the grim reality of indifference, or worse, that victims there and elsewhere face.
The horror has become almost routine. This time, the massacre site was a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where accused shooter James Holmes murdered and injured dozens of moviegoers. In 1999, the scene was nearby Columbine High School. By some estimates, there are more than 20 mass shootings per year in the United States. And always the same question: Why?
