Asia

Managing Editor Jonathan Tepperman interviews Gerald Curtis, Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, about Japan and its prime minister, Shinzō Abe.

For the second time in less than six months, polio vaccine workers in Pakistan have come under fire. For the gunmen, killing health care workers has been seen as a legitimate response to a nefarious extension of Western power. And, for the CIA, faux vaccine campaigns have sometimes been justified as part of the war on terror. Both sides are wrong: denying or providing health care should never be an instrument of statecraft.

Mongolia is one among a small handful of places left in the world with major untouched mineral deposits. But investing successfully in its mining industry demands more than just money and a willingness to take risks; it requires understanding the country's vulnerable geography and byzantine political environment.

Most observers are gloomy about the prospects for serious economic reform in China. But they ignore a central lesson of recent Chinese history: reform is possible when the right mix of conditions comes together at the right time. And the very circumstances that facilitated the last major burst of economic reform in the 1990s are largely present today.