Regions & Nations

At some point in the next 200 million years, according to Yale University scientists, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates will collide at the North Pole. When they are eventually joined by Africa, the singular super-continent will re-emerge, reminiscent of the Pangea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.

Dusk can feel like an apocalyptic time of day to arrive in Nigeria. As your flight descends into Lagos's Murtala Muhammed International Airport, you could be forgiven for having second thoughts as plumes of haze from constant oil fires in the Niger Delta rise into the sky. Nigeria is not for the faint-hearted.

For years, global economists have forecast a slowdown in China’s breakneck growth. Now that the deceleration is actually here, rich-world investors, companies and government officials, reliant on the Chinese juggernaut for their financial well-being, seem impatient for the revelry to resume, and are hoping that the Chinese government will follow up its stimulus of package of 2008-2009 with another generous injection of capital. (On Sept.

It has been just over 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the last great additions to the world’s list of independent nations. As Russia’s satellite republics staggered onto the global stage, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was it: the end of history, the final major release of static energy in a system now moving very close to equilibrium. A few have joined the club since — Eritrea, East Timor, the former Yugoslavian states, among others — but by the beginning of the 21st century, the world map seemed pretty much complete.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The Obama administration's reconciliation and transition efforts and parallel attempts to repair U.S.-Pakistan relations faced fresh challenges as the Pakistan-based Haqqani network was implicated in major attacks against the United States, NATO, and Afghanistan.  

Divorces don't happen overnight, but there's always that one moment, that one comment when -- perhaps only in retrospect -- you can see the split coming. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's recent trip to Afghanistan may have been unannounced, but he wasn't shy when it came to speaking about Pakistan.

Those of us in Washington watch with especially pointed curiosity — what will the elections’ outcome mean for the United States? Surely some in Pakistan have the same question. A healthy debate on the future of relations is a good thing, especially given recent efforts by both countries to get things back on track.

However, analysts on either side of the divide are not even in a position to answer those questions because both sides are trapped in a paradigm that views the relationship in stark black and white terms.

Economic interdependence among nations, Americans have long believed, is the surest and safest path both to a wide prosperity and a perpetual peace. If all nations jointly depend together on one vast "global" factory for many basic goods, so our thinking holds, no one state will ever dare disrupt the functioning of this "communalized" system.

There's never been a better time to visit North Korea. The specter of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, a potential nuclear test, assassinations of defectors in South Korea, and general saber-rattling haven't prevented a record 4,000 tourists from arriving in Pyongyang this year. There's even a hopeful air among diplomats that the two Koreas, as well as China and Japan, might find the right balance of words and gestures to smooth out their emotional grievances that fuel regular nationalist flare-ups.

In 2011, China’s economy grew 9.2 percent, compared with 10.4 percent in 2010. In the second quarter of 2012 that growth rate had fallen further, to 7.6 percent. That’s set alarm bells ringing about the fate of the China miracle. Will the most successful and rapid decline in global poverty in the history of humanity shudder to a halt? Will the Asian Century be postponed, leaving the U.S., against the odds, as the undisputed top nation for the foreseeable future?