“Israeli leaders are seriously considering a dormant Saudi plan offering a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for lands captured during the 1967 war,” reports say.
The 2002 Saudi plan is unusually straightforward, and has been endorsed by the 22-member Arab League: Arab states would fully recognize Israel in return for Israel’s relinquishing the territories it occupied in 1967–the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Israelis in favor of the plan still have qualms about elements that may endorse some kind of large -scale “right of return,” in which Palestinians could go to Israel if they or their families were uprooted in 1948.
The Washington Post reports that the credit crisis is being used as an argument against independence for Scotland, with suggestions that Scotland would not have been able to weather the crisis on its own.
Practical factors come into play as well: with the bank bailout by the central government, “it has not been lost on Scots that the largest shareholder in Scotland’s two largest banks is now the British government.”
The pro-independence Scottish National Party, which currently governs Scotland, contents that Scottish membership in the EU would provide the kind of assistance now provided by the central government of the UK.
The article notes that only about 25-30% of Scots favor independence.
Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New World Order, offers some tips for a new US president in the October issue of Wired, in an article by Daniel Pink.
- The United States can avoid decline by “tightening trade and energy ties to the rest of the hemisphere, pursuing economic innovation at home, and establishing a ‘diplomatic-industrial complex.’”
- The US should create “an energy partnership with Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, and Brazil,” reducing dependence on oil from the Middle East.
- The US should treat Mexico as the EU does Turkey, “integrating, elevating, and partnering with it.”
- Egypt is “ripe for revolt. We should make friends quickly with other power centers in the country, including the Muslim Brotherhood.”
- The US should offer Iranians a deal: oust President Ahmadinejad, and they will get “everything they want in terms of of Western investment in energy, freer trade, diplomatic recognition, and increased cultural and student exchanges.”
- Uzbekistan merits attention, as the most populous and industrialized country in Central Asia, and the only state that shares borders with all the other “stans.”
- “India will never rival China . . . It’s not a superpower.”
- China’s rise will not be hindered by “demands for such niceties as transparency or free expression,” as “the Chinese people have a preference for stability over another revolution.”
- Russia has more problems than potential: it is “in demographic free fall” and “Chinese immigration is blurring the border.”
The October issue of Alaska Magazine covers the Alaska independence movement in all its gradations.
In “The Country of Alaska,” Rebecca Luczycki’s portrait suggests that serious secessionists are rare, and that even many members of the Alaska Independence Party (the state’s third-largest) are really just libertarians. The founder of the party may have said, “I’m an Alaskan, not an American,” but many Alaskan “nationalists” seem to want more state-level control and less “interference” from the federal government.
Alaskan independence is very low-probability, not least because of the culture of dependence that has developed. Luczycki quotes Sara Chambers, a member of the Juneau city assembly: “Alaskans are not necessarily dedicated to freedom, but have become dedicated to free stuff.”