Africa

The dramatic fall of oil prices is set to jeopardize both the U.S. ambition to become a big gas exporter by the end of this decade and the long-awaited development of a global gas market.

This is the final installment of a five-part series exploring the painstaking diplomacy and intelligence efforts that led Libya and its quixotic leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, to relinquish that country's weapons of mass destruction.

Dr. Eugene Kogan examines the West's approach to Iran and Syria through the lens of coercive diplomacy. Both cases, he argues, offer a chance to revitalize coercion as a tool of American diplomacy.

"Addressing this triple challenge (more food, less hunger, less environmental degradation) will require more than just funding. For the FAO to continue to serve as the world's leading authority on food and agriculture policy, it will need to reinvent itself, becoming a thought leader in ending the hunger of ideas on how to end hunger. For example, what is the role of advance market purchasing in hunger reduction? What should be done about foreign direct investment in agriculture and large-scale land acquisitions? How should food price spikes be managed? What are the benefits and risks of emerging food and agricultural technologies? The FAO needs to be leading the debates in these and other areas."

"...if China continues to prioritise friendly commercial relations with North Korea and Iran, it will threaten its own long-term security. A chronically proliferating North Korea would provoke Japan to reassess the need for a nuclear deterrent, while a nuclear-armed Iran could destabilise the Gulf and global energy markets. Crafting an approach that includes a sustained US-China engagement to clarify each side's intent, provides for China's energy security and maintains a focus on the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran is more likely to achieve our shared non-proliferation goals."

According to the World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change, ... a two-degree Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels could permanently reduce Africa's annual per capita consumption by four to five per cent....The report calls on industrialised countries, which have released most of the greenhouse gases, to lead the way in charting a new low-carbon economic path. In addition, the report calls for financial support to enable developing countries adapt to climate change and lay the foundation for low-carbon economies.

"...the Bush administration's foreign policy rests on a deep misreading of contemporary world politics. Conducting foreign policy on the basis of flawed premises is like designing an airplane while ignoring gravity...."

TYRANNY OFTEN ends in a whimper, not a conflagration. So it seems in today's Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's immensely corrupt regime has destroyed a once prosperous African country, leaving behind only the stench of decay.

Could the World Be on the Path to a New Nuclear Crisis?