The Obama administration's "pivot" to Asia made sense, because China was starting to doubt U.S. staying power. Now that Washington has sent Beijing a clear message it will be around for the long haul, however, the time has come for the two countries to deepen and institutionalize their relationship in order to secure Asia's lasting peace and prosperity.

Even as Mexico continues to struggle with grave security threats, its steady rise is transforming the country's economy, society, and political system. Given the Mexico's bright future and the interests it shares with the United States in energy, manufacturing, and security, Washington needs to start seeing its southern neighbor as a partner instead of a problem.

Instead of continuing their endless battling, the United States and Pakistan should acknowledge that their interests simply do not converge enough to make them strong partners. Giving up the fiction of an alliance would free up Washington to explore new ways of achieving its goals in South Asia. And it would allow Islamabad to finally pursue its regional ambitions -- which would either succeed once and for all or, more likely, teach Pakistani officials the limitations of their country's power.

The election of the hawkish Shinzo Abe as Japan's prime minister has the world worrying that Tokyo is about to part with its pacifist strategy of the last 70 years. But Japan's new leaders are pragmatic, and so long as the United States does not waver in its commitment to the country's defense, they are unlikely chart a new course.

Pundits tend to treat terrorism and guerrilla tactics as something new, but nothing could be further from the truth. Although the agendas have changed over the years -- from tribalism, to liberalism and nationalism, to socialism, to jihadist extremism -- guerrilla and terrorist warfare has been ubiquitous throughout history and consistently deadly.

Since 1988, Brazilians have cleared more than 153,000 square miles of Amazonian rain forest, devastating the environment and driving global climate change forward ever faster. Recently, however, Brazil has changed its course, reducing the rate of deforestation by 83 percent since 2004. At the same time, it has become a test case for a controversial international climate-change prevention strategy that places a monetary value on the carbon stored in forests.

Two new books lament the outsized role of the military in Israeli national security decisionmaking, blaming the generals for favoring force over diplomacy.

Foreign policy realists have long found inspiration in the ideas of Lord Castlereagh, who served as British foreign secretary during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

Somewhat overshadowed by his longtime ally, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish President Abdullah Gul has begun to carve out a more independent, progressive path.

The crisis of democracy identified in the 1970s never really went away; it was just papered over with temporary solutions and obscured by a series of lucky breaks.

In the next decade, China will continue to rise, not fade. Its leaders will consolidate the one-party model and, in the process, challenge the West's smug certainty about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy.

Li is far too confident in the benefits of Chinese authoritarianism. So far, what has held China back is not any lack of demand for democracy, but a lack of supply.

The Arab uprisings of 2011, once a great source of hope for democracy enthusiasts, have given way to sectarian clashes and political instability.

It's easy to be pessimistic about the Arab Spring, given the post-revolutionary turmoil the Middle East is now experiencing.

The United States' approach to counterinsurgency, championed by General David Petraeus, helped produce stunning results in parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If there's one indisputable fact about this most polarizing of figures, it's that he is hard to get rid of -- and every retreat, even his most recent withdrawal from political life, lays the groundwork for an eventual counterattack.

Halting Iran's progress toward a bomb will require the United States to make credible promises and credible threats simultaneously -- an exceedingly difficult trick to pull off.

Now, more than ever, the United States might be tempted to pull back from the world.

Republicans need to start taking foreign policy more seriously, thinking hard about the thorny task of managing a superpower and not leaving it as a plaything for right-wing interest groups. Failure to do so quickly could be catastrophic, ceding this ground to Democrats for the a generation at least.

The amount of resources the American public and private sectors commit to all forms of welfare is massive -- the fifth highest outlay in the world.