Harlan Ullman

This weekend, many tens of millions of some 200 million Pakistanis will elect new national and four provincial governments. The elections are a remarkable milestone due in large measure to President Asif Zardari’s political navigational skills in the most roiled of waters.  This is the first time in Pakistan’s history that an elected civilian government has completed a full five-year term and will be replaced democratically. At this stage, the only likely outcome is continued PPP control of the Senate and its 104 seats as only a third of the senators are up for re-election.  Most polls rank Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N party as the favorite possibly winning 90-100 [...]

Over a century ago, as this column noted, events in Europe were simultaneously described as serious but not yet desperate and as desperate but not serious.  Given the antics of the Boy Sun King in Pyongyang, Kim Jung Un, it is hard to know how serious or desperate the current situation on the Korean peninsula is. Kim unilaterally abrogated the truce that ended the Korean War sixty years ago; cut off the hotline with Seoul; threatened to strike America; provocatively moved several of his mobile rockets; restarted the Yongbyon reactor; and warned diplomats in the north to leave in advance of conflict.  Is Kim serious in threatening a state of [...]

During the Cold War, the thermonuclear standoff between the U.S. and Soviet Union was often described as two scorpions in a bottle. The notion was that both scorpions would sting the other to death no matter which struck first. Of course, the prospect of the scorpions being of the opposite sex with options other than mutual suicide was rarely raised. Today, the United States and Iran are not two scorpions in that once famous bottle. But both states remain locked in a dangerous embrace going back decades to the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in the 1950’s and the restoration of the Shah to the 1979 revolution and takeover of [...]