Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
This week, the unsettling of stability in Asia took yet another turn. Just as Chinese President Xi Jinping was due to arrive in South Korea — which is angry at Japan over denials about World War II “comfort women” — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced a changed interpretation of the constitution that allows Japanese military forces to operate abroad.
As Shannon Tiezzi writes, China’s approach is now aimed at exploiting differences within Japanese public opinion over Abe’s new nationalism. From Australia, John Garnaut writes that an old idea of Colin Powell’s is being raised anew: an alliance of democratic states in Asia to counter China’s new influence.
Meanwhile, protesters who fear liberties will be curbed filled the streets of Hong Kong over Beijing’s proposal for how universal suffrage will be implemented there in 2017.
From Beijing, WorldPost correspondent Matt Sheehan reports on a commencement speech by Alibaba’s Jack Ma at Tsinghua University and economist Ping Chen looks at how Thomas Piketty’s analysis of inequality applies to China.
In the Middle East, ISIS announced it was establishing a new “caliphate” in areas of Syria and Iraq under its control. Legendary former MI-6 agent Alastair Crooke cites in detail ISIS doctrine on how to “manage savagery” when setting up a new Islamic state. Ibrahim al-Marashi dissects the common myths about what is now happening in Iraq. Writing from Singapore, Ooi Kee Beng explores the religio- ideological links between Brunei’s imposition of Shari’a law, the ISIS movement in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Concerning employment and globalization, Bill Clinton suggests ways in which innovation can create new jobs while United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard blames Asian subsidies for “eating America’s lunch.”
Noam Chomsky argues that American foreign policy is driven by corporate interests and long-time Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson skewers Dick Cheney for continuing to press the imperial aims of wealth and power in American foreign policy.
Finally, Twiplomacy’s Florian Hildebrandt analyzes the world’s most powerful leaders on Twitter: Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Indonesian President Yudhoyono and India’s Narendra Modi.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Nicholas Sabloff is the Executive International Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s 10 international editions. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s World Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Cairo; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy) and Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review). Katherine Keating (One-On-One) and Jehangir Pocha (NewsX India) .
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
