Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This week: What Americans think about China.

Jeffrey Gettleman, “Africa’s Dirty Wars,” The New York Review of Books, March 2012. I saw how hollow such leadership can be when I attended an expensive Darfur peace conference in Sirte, Libya,…

On September 21, Sudanese authorities announced that they had thwarted an attempted coup. Civilian leaders assert that the incident is just another example of the urgent need for security-sector reform; meanwhile, military leaders have suggested that civilian mismanagement of the economy provides fertile ground for attempts to overthrow the government.