The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July.

The World Bank was established in 1944 to promote economic development, and virtually every country is now a member. Its central mission is to reduce global poverty and ensure that global development is environmentally sound and socially inclusive. Achieving these goals would not only improve the lives of billions of people, but would also forestall violent conflicts that are stoked by poverty, famine, and struggles over scarce resources.

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The usually reliable sources tell us that President Obama picked up a recent edition of the highly reliable New Republic and came away impressed. He read a lengthy essay by Robert Kagan amorphously titled “Not Fade Away,” but unambiguously subtitled “The Myth of American Decline” — the latter saying it all. The president then expropriated (eminent domain?) the essay’s theme for part of his State of the Union message, saying, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Among those who have done so is Barack Obama himself.

The president’s telling has been expressed sometimes in words, but more so in actions. He has conducted himself and his foreign policy as if the United States has indeed slipped in power, prestige and, more important, commitment. The same Obama who cited — again, in the State of the Union — Madeleine Albright’s famous formulation that America is the “indispensable nation,” dispensed with American power and prestige in failing to take the lead in confronting Moammar Gaddafi in Libya and instead was goaded into the fray by Britain and France. This was called “leading from behind,” which is indistinguishable from panting to keep up.

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George Orwell coined the useful term “unperson” for creatures denied personhood because they don’t abide by state doctrine. We may add the term “unhistory” to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

The unhistory of unpersons is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries. Important ones are usually commemorated, with due solemnity when appropriate: Pearl Harbor, for example. Some are not, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by extricating them from unhistory.

Right now we are failing to commemorate an event of great human significance: the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s decision to launch the direct invasion of South Vietnam, soon to become the most extreme crime of aggression since World War II.

Kennedy ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam (by February 1962, hundreds of missions had flown); authorized chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve the rebellious population into submission; and set in motion the programs that ultimately drove millions of villagers into urban slums and virtual concentration camps, or “Strategic Hamlets.” There the villagers would be “protected” from the indigenous guerrillas whom, as the administration knew, they were willingly supporting.

Official efforts at justifying the attacks were slim, and mostly fantasy.

Typical was the president’s impassioned address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, where he warned that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence.” At the United Nations on Sept. 25, 1961, Kennedy said that if this conspiracy achieved its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

The short-term effects were reported by the highly respected Indochina specialist and military ...

Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut nuclear arsenal.  Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional representatives, aren’t leaving the scene any time soon, though delays or cuts in purchase orders are planned.  All this should reassure us that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably ineffective institution we’ve come to know and squander our treasure on.

Still, the cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that will change the American way of war.  They may mean little in monetary terms -- the Pentagon budget is actually slated to increase through 2017 -- but in imperial terms they will make a difference.  A new way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into focus and one thing ...

Robert Egan has a pretty good feel for how desperate the CIA is for scraps of information about North Korea.

Egan has served barbecue to North Korean diplomats at his restaurant in Hackensack, N.J., for 15 years, and he has visited Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, several times. He also has fed details about his customers to U.S. authorities, even plucking stray hairs off their suits so American officials could trace the DNA. Not surprisingly, he has found FBI surveillance equipment hidden in his office.

U.S. intelligence is "using a guy who flips burgers for a living" to understand North Korea, said Egan, a 53-year-old high school dropout whose odd role as a citizen ambassador has been optioned as an HBO movie.

U.S. officials downplay their interest in Egan, but they don't deny that they are hungry for insight on a nuclear armed nation that is possibly the world's toughest to spy on, a virtual black hole for most intelligence agencies.

The latest evidence: U.S. officials apparently were unaware for 51 hours that longtime leader Kim Jong Il had died Dec. 17, hearing the news only when it was announced on North Korean TV. They now are scrambling for the skinny on his youngest son and appointed successor, Kim Jong Un, a chubby 27-year-old known to enjoy playing video games.

More important, despite the near-constant gaze of spy satellites, U.S. intelligence agencies were stunned to learn from Israeli officials in 2007 that North Korean scientists had helped Syria build a secret nuclear reactor in the desert. Israeli warplanes bombed the site when President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Similarly, U.S. intelligence was caught off guard in November 2010 when North Korean officials took a visiting American scientist on a tour of a newly constructed uranium enrichment facility that is making low-level reactor fuel but could be converted to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

The ...

The outlook for the global economy in 2012 is clear, but it isn’t pretty: recession in Europe, anemic growth at best in the United States, and a sharp slowdown in China and in most emerging-market economies. Asian economies are exposed to China. Latin America is exposed to lower commodity prices (as both China and the advanced economies slow). Central and Eastern Europe are exposed to the eurozone. And turmoil in the Middle East is causing serious economic risks – both there and elsewhere – as geopolitical risk remains high and thus high oil prices will constrain global growth.

At this point, a eurozone recession is certain. While its depth and length cannot be predicted, a continued credit crunch, sovereign-debt problems, lack of competitiveness, and fiscal austerity imply a serious downturn.

The US – growing at a snail’s pace since 2010 – faces considerable downside risks from the eurozone crisis. It must also contend with significant fiscal drag, ongoing deleveraging in the household sector (amid weak job creation, stagnant incomes, and persistent downward pressure on real estate and financial wealth), rising inequality, and political gridlock.

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Elsewhere among the major advanced economies, the United Kingdom is double dipping, as front-loaded fiscal consolidation and eurozone exposure undermine growth. In Japan, the post-earthquake recovery will fizzle out as weak governments fail to implement structural reforms.

Meanwhile, flaws in China’s growth model are becoming obvious. Falling property prices are starting a chain reaction that will have a negative effect on ...

The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
 

Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org. 
 

"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said. 
 

The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins. 
 

U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source. 
 

The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defense to be a safer re-supply option than trucking ...

This was not simply a geographic shift. With a presidential election approaching in 2012, the president is emphasizing jobs, not war. When it comes to economic opportunity, Asia is where the action is. 

"No region will do more to shape our long-term economic future than the Asia Pacific region," the president announced at his press conference on Monday. APEC links the United States with 20 other countries, including Japan, Russia, South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, and accounts for nearly half of the world's trade. 

But the president did not have an easy time in Hawai'i steering U.S. foreign policy in a different direction. The Middle East overshadowed the APEC discussions, with the first question for the president at his press conference focusing on Iran and U.S. sanctions.

In fact, aside from the hot-button issue of economic competition with China, none of the journalists seemed very much interested in Asian matters. The chief focus of news coverage of the event was the president's decision to break with the APEC tradition of forcing heads of state to wear native garb for a photo op. 

The Obama administration has long wanted to reorient, literally, U.S. foreign policy. During their years of political exile under the George W. Bush administration, key foreign policy figures like Kurt Campbell complained of how Washington was ignoring Pacific affairs at its peril.

Although Campbell is now in charge of Asian affairs at the State Department and his current boss Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has worked hard to achieve this reorientation by visiting the region and attending regional confabs, the Obama administration has largely continued the Bush-era focus on fighting in Afghanistan and conducting counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan and around the Horn of Africa. 

Even though Obama has largely fulfilled his promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, the Arab Spring has presented ...

Some 40 years ago, when I entered Oxford University as a graduate student, I declared my interest in the Middle East. I was told that this part of the world came under the rubric of “Oriental Studies,” and that I would be assigned an appropriate professor. But when I arrived for my first meeting at the professor’s office, his bookshelves were lined with volumes bearing Chinese characters. He was a specialist in what was, at least for me at the time, the wrong Orient.

Something akin to this mistake has befallen American foreign policy. The United States has become preoccupied with the Middle East – in certain ways, the wrong Orient – and has not paid adequate attention to East Asia and the Pacific, where much of the twenty-first century’s history will be written.

The good news is that this focus is shifting. Indeed, a quiet transformation is taking place in American foreign policy, one that is as significant as it is overdue. The US has rediscovered Asia.

“Rediscovered” is the operative word here. Asia was one of the two ...

The world's population is expected to reach 7 billion on Monday, four years later than once predicted largely thanks to China's family planning policy, according to the country's top population experts.

Population growth has rocketed. It took just 13 years for 1 billion more people to live on the planet, yet only at the dawn of the 19th century did a billion people first inhabit the Earth, according to a report by the United Nations Population Fund.

Baby No 7 Billion will probably be born in the Asia-Pacific region, where the population growth rate is the highest in the world.

China's family planning policy, which limits most mainland couples to one child, has prevented 400 million births since 1979, according to the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

The rising population presents challenges to humanity, Safiye Cagar, director of information and external relations for the fund, said on Tuesday.

"If we do not voluntarily stabilize population, we risk a much less humane end to growth as the ongoing destruction of the earth's natural systems catches up with us," the UN report said.

"How do we ensure that each of us has a decent standard of living while sustaining Earth's resources?" Cagar said

Such a huge population will put a lot of pressure on Earth, said Yuan Xin, a professor at Tianjin-based Nankai University's population and development institute. For example, the population increase plus the pursuit of a better quality of life will require more resources and therefore put the environment in danger.

"The prevented births of China are also significant for natural resource and environment preservation across the world," Yuan said Tuesday. "But that merit might be offset if the Chinese consume relentlessly like the Westerners did, given China's sheer population size."

Official data released by China and the United ...

When Fiji’s brutally repressive military tried to detain an 80-year-old reverend with the Methodist Church this summer due to his involvement with politics, it caused quite a stir — not only because of his age or his former position as the military’s head chaplain, but also because he refused to let the soldiers take him to the barracks. “I told them, the only way to take me to camp now is bundle up my legs, tied up, and my hands, I will not go with you,” was how he described the incident to New Zealand press. “That is the only way, you carry me to the camp or you bring your gun and shoot me and you carry my dead body to the camp to show to the commander,” he said.

This kind of dissension from a former military official is not typical of the one group of Fijians that actually receives special treatment. Fiji’s strongman Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama goes out of his way not to antagonize the military, which has intentionally trained more soldiers than it could handle in order to supply thousands of them to the British Army, American mercenary companies, and the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations in places like Iraq, Sinai, Lebanon, Sudan, and Somalia.

Lieutenant Colonel Ratu Tevita Mara — profiled in part one of this series as Fiji’s highest-ranking defector — has asked for the use of Fijian soldiers overseas to be stopped until democracy is restored, since he sees the practice as helping to keep Bainimarama in the military’s good graces. “He certainly rewards the military by sending them on peacekeeping duties overseas, and yes of course they get extra allowance, extra money for that,” Mara told me in a recent ...