Although the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for  fiscal 2003 designates Taiwan as a “major non-NATO Ally,” Washington maintains “strategic ambiguity” -- meaning that the U.S. takes no official position as to whether  Taiwan belongs to China. Taiwan’s fate is to be negotiated between China and Taiwan; however, that negotiation must be free and peaceful. To ensure that Taiwan is not invaded by China, the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 requires Washington to provide Taiwan weapons of a defensive nature.

Much of Gorbachev's discussion hinges on East-West relations, particularly between Russia and the United States. This is logical, as certain interests of pre-Soviet Russia were taken up by the Soviet Union, and, post-Soviet collapse, these same interests were transferred to the nascent Russian Federation (and carried on to the present).While there is a brief chapter covering both China and India, with a brief discussion of Malaysia included, the discussion borders on the facile.

As Senator McCain himself repeated relentlessly, American lives were lost at Benghazi and given the obvious lapses in security measures, that is simply unacceptable.  Instead of insisting the focus remain on an examination of those security measures in an effort to ensure that any mistakes made were never repeated, McCain nearly singlehandedly created a political sideshow of questionable value that only distracted attention away from the real and important issues.  If this distraction in any way detracts from identifying and correcting the mistakes made, then another tragedy could possibly occur, one, like that which occurred at Benghazi, could have been prevented if the right people had been paying attention to the right issues.

"Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaida-type individuals. We have in — in Egypt a Muslim Brotherhood president…." With those words, spoken Monday night by Barack Obama's Republican challenger Mitt Romney just 40 seconds in the last of three debates, Africa was placed at the center of U.S. foreign policy and international security. The radical and pro-al Qaeda sect, Ansar Eddine, and the umbrella group of Tuareg tribal militias known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) have since December 2011 worked together to gain control of Timbuktu and most of northern Mali.

The killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of September 11 should provoke a similar examination of the Obama presidency. Here was a quintessential ambassador – an Arabic speaker, popular among ordinary Libyans, who had worked with the revolutionaries to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi – killed in the line of duty.  It was a colossal failure, marking a nadir in a presidency that boasted a break with Bush-era unilateralism and a promise to “commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground” with the Muslim world. 

For longtime Indochina observers, the developing story is one full of irony and a signal for a major shift in the long if arduous U.S.-Indochina relations. Nearly four decades have passed, but America barely recovered from its psychic wounds. Vietnam, after all, was our “hell in a small place.” It spelled America’s ignominy. The country known for its manifest destiny was soundly defeated by what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once called a “fourth-rate power.” Still, here we are, at the turn of the millennia, seeking a return.