Packages and shipping containers and luggage and trucks can be searched, although in reality this can be done only a tiny percentage of the time lest business and tourism grind to a halt.

also a handful of countries in between: the Philippines is a democracy but is backsliding into authoritarianism, Thailand was once a democracy but is now governed by its military, and Myanmar (Burma) recently…

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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

Brazil and Indonesia, in particular, are two countries whose forests are shrinking, and unless their governments take steps to protect these forests responding to climate change will be more difficult.

A second area of international effort involves taking refugees in on a temporary basis, although this often turns out to be an open-ended if not permanent commitment. The countries that have accepted the largest number of refugees in recent years include Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, and Sudan, all neighbors of those countries where conflict has

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.

Iraq for its part is, at least on paper, the Arab country that has it all: oil, water, arable land, and a large and educated population. Emerging from decades of Ottoman and British rule, it should have evolved into a Middle Eastern “tiger,” one resembling similar medium-sized countries in Asia that boomed economically and transitioned, at least in

The European Allies also share some of the blame. As is often the case in history, it was not what the major European countries did as much as what they chose not to do. The lack of military preparation, the embrace of symbolic but toothless international pacts, the appeasement of German…

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There is no specific date when the Cold War ended (as there tends to be when “hot” wars end), but most historians place it in late 1989, when the wall separating East and West Berlin was taken down, or in 1991, when the Soviet Union along with its external empire in Eastern Europe unraveled.