World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

One of the more interesting exercises in world politics is assessing the military capabilities of other states.  It is always a difficult one when one is assessing the budgets of states with different ways of accounting for different expenditures.  China has released its new military budget and this article from Business Week  goes over some of the imponderables in trying to assess how much of a threat China is to the rest of the world.

Iran held elections on Saturday, but the results are hard to interpret.  It doesn’t appear as if the results will force any major change in policies, but may in fact make it more difficult to get things done.  On the foreign policy issue of the nuclear program, it doesn’t seem as if it was a major issue.  As is the case with most elections, the state of the economy seems to have been the critical concern of the voters.

One hidden dimension of the violence in Syria is the role of climate change.  Most Americans believe that climate change is only a long-term threat, but this article suggests that the link between conflict and climate change is already happening and is real.