Regions & Nations

The new year begins precariously. The global economy vacillates between signs of recovery and omens of collapse. Businesses seem paralyzed. Even though they’re sitting on $2 trillion in cash, they’re risk-averse, strategically incremental, and notably lacking in fresh ideas.

We think this stinks. The world needs invention and daring now more than ever. Now is the time for audacity, not austerity.

Whenever someone asked me why we have the same anachronistic policy toward an island nation 90 ninety from our shores that we have had for half a century, I generally tell them that Cuba simply "doesn't matter." In a big-picture sense, our policy hasn't changed (or has only gotten hotter) since the Cold War ended and left two combatants behind on the field.

The first book to complicate the reputation of George Kennan came out in 1967. It was 600 pages long, and the cover would show a forlorn young man staring right at you. The tale was of an awkward boy from the Midwest who never quite fits in. He gains knowledge in the Foreign Service and becomes the United States' wisest Soviet analyst. Then, for a brief -- but crucial -- moment, he serves as the head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under President Harry Truman, helping remake the world after World War II.

It’s hard to describe, let alone explain, my melancholic reaction to the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy after watching it in a sold-out theater on Saturday. Sure, the film, adapted from the classic Cold War novel by John Le Carré, captures the dread of 1970s London and the wearying ambivalence of Cold War intelligence wars. But I wasn’t expecting to emerge from the theater feeling a sense of loss.

Kim Jong-il, the pygmy tyrant of North Korea, is dead at the age of 69. His 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, now assumes the throne of Pyongyang. According to various press analyses, the new leader is either a bumbling naïf or a clever, multilingual operator who's already formed alliances with key generals. He will either push market reforms or preserve the status quo. He will reach out to the West or step up confrontation or do neither.

Here's the real answer: We really don't know much of anything.

For the last four years, Russia was ruled according to a careful choreography: President Dmitry Medvedev was the face of a variously tough-talking and reformist agenda that included the erection of Skolkovo, a richly financed version of Silicon Valley, and cordiality with the United States. Meanwhile, actual power was wielded by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose will was enacted while he traveled the country exhibiting his physique and off-beat sporting abilities.

After 10 years of war and reconstruction, and as tens of thousands of international troops and aid workers in Afghanistan gear up to spend yet another holiday season a long way from the comforts of home, a lot of people are wondering: Was it worth it? Certainly Dec.

As the last American troops leave Iraq (a remarkable phrase, which many once doubted would ever be uttered), two questions come to mind: Was the war worth it? And did we, in any sense, win?

The two questions, of course, are related: The first concerns cost, the second benefits. But however you do the calculation, it's clear that the decision to invade Iraq was a major strategic blunder—and that the policies we pursued in the early months of the occupation tipped the blunder into a catastrophe.

By the beginning of the Obama Administration, democracy promotion had become a rather tarnished idea, and understandably so. Like Islam or Christianity, much blood has been shed beneath its banner. It may be true that democracies don’t go to war with one another, but they certainly go to war, and their wars kill people just as dead as the wars undertaken by illiberal regimes. Anyone on the political left can tell the story: During the Cold War, the United States fought endless proxy wars and engaged in a great deal of overt and covert mischief, all in the name of democracy.

Call 2011 the year of the biometric ID. Once the territory of high-security enclaves and spy novels, identification by iris scan, fingerprint, and other unique physical features has now become de rigueur around the world—especially in India, whose program to ID every citizen has been the subject of almost giddy reports about the technology's potential to democratize society. The New York Times described India's biometric database as "building real citizenship" for the first time. Wired emphasized how biometrics can finally bring the disenfranchised into the formal economy.