Assembling Afghanistan

• The Washington Post
• December 3, 2001

The United States and its allies are winning the war in Afghanistan. But the danger is that a short-sighted vision of what our role should be once the Taliban have been removed from power still could lose the peace. There have been encouraging words from the Bush administration that it will not “walk away” after the military campaign.

Step Aside, Mr. Kuchma

• Financial Times
• March 2, 2001

The future of Ukraine as an independent democratic state hangs in the balance. President Leonid Kuchma stands accused of complicity in the murder of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist whose headless and mutilated body was identified this week, months after his disappearance The revelations about Mr Kuchma’s alleged involvement in a host of crimes from murder to corruption came from his former bodyguard who, after bugging the president’s office, leaked tapes which—if proved authentic—are a devastating indictment.

How to Encourage the Balkans

• Financial Times
• November 23, 2000

The fall of Slobodan Milosevic does not cure the political woes of the Balkans; it raises their urgency. Yugoslavia has disintegrated, but the disintegration is incomplete. Vojislav Kostunica, the new president, won his mandate solely from support in Serbia. Montenegro, Serbia’s junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, mostly boycotted the poll while Albanians in the disputed province of Kosovo ignored the elections.

End the Estate Tax? No, Keep It Alive To Help the Needy

• The Wall Street Journal
• July 14, 2000

Supporters of repealing the estate tax say the legislation would save family farms and businesses and lift a terrible and unfair burden. I happen to be fortunate enough to be eligible for the tax benefits of this legislation, and so I wish I could convince myself to believe the proponents’ rhetoric.

Who Lost Russia?

• The New York Review of Books
• April 13, 2000

1. The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991 offered a historic opportunity to transform that part of the world into open societies; but the Western democracies failed to rise to the occasion and the entire world has to suffer the consequences.

Ukraine: It Isn’t Enough to Shed Communism

• The Washington Post
• November 23, 1999

Leonid Kuchma may have trounced his nearest contender—the Communist Petro Simonenko— but his recent election to a second five-year term as Ukraine’s president falls short of being a victory for democracy. Indeed, Kuchma seems to have torn a page from Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign manual, using strongarm tactics to silence the opposition and a tainted privatization process to buy support from the country’s powerful and corrupt oligarchs.

Breaking the Cycle of Violence

• Financial Times
• November 9, 1999

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union may at last be redeeming its promise to admit former Communist states to membership. The enlargement strategy proposed by Romano Prodi’s European Commission is well conceived and farsighted. Its key feature is that all the candidate countries meeting the political criteria are to be allowed to assemble at the starting line, but their progress will depend on their own performance.

I’m Ready to Fund Organized Programs

• The New York Daily News
• May 4, 1999

Gangs recruiting in the South Bronx, people perplexed by the meaning of the Littleton, Colo., school massacre, the mayor and schools chancellor colliding over school governance—clearly, questions about young people and how best to guide them to adulthood are Topic A here and around the nation.

To Avert the Next Crisis

• Financial Times
• January 4, 1999

So will it be business as usual in 1999? The recent dramatic volatility in financial markets is but a distant memory. The miseries of Russians and Indonesians seem far away. But the global financial system still has fundamental flaws. Unless these problems are addressed and we learn the lessons of the past year, the system is liable to collapse.

The Only Way for Russia to End Its Crisis

• Financial Times
• August 13, 1998

The meltdown in Russian financial markets has reached the terminal phase. Bankers and brokers who had borrowed against securities could not meet margin calls and forced selling swamped both the stock and the bond markets. The stock market had to be temporarily closed because trades could not be settled; prices of government bonds and Treasury bills fell precipitously.