Top 5 Foreign Policy Stories You Missed in 2009

From Foreign Policy Magazine comes this article "The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009". It has pictures and in depth analysis, but here is a handy summary of the top five stories for you:

1. The Northeast Passage Opens for Business. Good (lower cost of transporting goods around the world) or bad (an omen of the mystical cult of Global Warming), this does raise the importance of the Arctic Ocean, which is now accessible to exploration and development. This may be the cause of rising tensions between Russia and the US.
2. Iraq's New Flashpoint. Iraq's Arab and Kurdish populations are at odds with one another in the Nineveh region, not because of oil, but because of a large Kurdish population in this area, which is outside of the autonomous Kurdish region. Neither side has turned to violence- yet.
3. A Hotline for China and India. You only put in a hotline between world leaders when you are afraid that miscommunication may result and someone may make an unwise decision to nuke the other. The key to this conflict is the Himalayan region of Tawang, which is in India but China claims was part of Tibet (which is now part of China). The area has been increasingly militarized, and the Indian military documented 270 border violations and almost 2,300 cases of "aggressive border patrolling" by the Chinese in 2008.
4. A New Housing Bubble? More than any other factor, ill-advised speculation on U.S. real estate set off the global financial crisis. But even after millions of foreclosures and secondary effects ripped through economies around the world, a new housing bubble is forming again, for the same reasons the first did- Democratic pressure on banks to give everyone a home loan, Democratic pressure on banks to be nice about credit scores, Democratic 'stimulus' money for home sales, and Democratic pressure on banks to keep interest rates low and print money. Be prepared for Democratic policies such as these destroying the world's economies again sometime soon.
5. The ‘Civilian Surge' Fizzles. A major part of the strategy in dealing with terrorism and failed states was a surge in civilian personal from the State Department and USAID, but it turns out, those agencies have failed to deliver, and now the military is trying to meet that commitment too.