Flying from Xian to Beijing this week, I spotted the books above at the airport book shop.  They were the marquis offering in the place — front, center of the store.

photo credit: Steve Clemons I’m in China this week and have had limited internet access (and time) to post while bouncing between meetings and cities.

During the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany traded the geostrategic insecurity of a Cold War fault line and divided nation for a unified country with high levels of economic tension.  The transfer payments from the West to the East were politically and economically stressful.

Off to China this morning. Shanghai is first part of trip. Feeling a lot like Oakley right now.

\ Tom Donilon was sworn in as the 23rd National Security Advisor on the 8th of October last year — and though it’s a bit late in the month to pounce on the anniversary date of his ascension, I am putting together an article looking at whether America’s foreign and national security platforms have been…

The congressional “Super Committee” by most accounts is working feverishly to get some sort of deal that would avoid triggering an automatic $1.2 trillion set of cuts across government accounts.

A close friend with whom I worked in Senator Jeff Bingaman‘s office in the 1990s, Wayne Propst, was forged into who he is today in part because of his experiences teaching people how to create fish ponds in Ghana.

Think tanks in Washington scramble and compete with each other to influence the policy debate on a variety of fronts — but what is desperately needed is for one of them to put forward a white paper on how to spell Moammer Gaddafi’s name.  This is not a trivial matter.

Pervez Musharraf, the former Army general turned (former) President of Pakistan, is a different man than the Musharraf who has now declared that he will again contest for his nation’s presidency.

The World Economic Forum‘s Global Competitiveness Index offers comparative rankings for 139 countries.  Here is the pdf of the United States report. Here’s how the United States ranked on the various criteria in the 2010-2011 Global Competitiveness Report.  The picture is not good.