Last week, we got more proof of Wall Street's utter disconnect from the rest of the world when Goldman Sachs's chief executive Lloyd Blankfein was quoted as saying he's doing "God's work." Apparently, he's also a "blue-collar guy" and "everybody should be happy" that he and his peers are on track to take home billions in bonuses this year. Blankfein's hubris generated disbelief among the foreign CEOs and government officials attending a Chinese business conference, put on by a Swiss outfit called Horasis, in Lisbon last week. "Do you think those quotes might be made up?" one Latin American participant asked.

Sadly, no (though Goldman says the God comment was "ironic"). At the same conference last year, right after the start of the financial crisis, there was a surprising lack of ire at the U.S. for causing this mess. Now, with emerging markets surging ahead while rich countries face a low-growth decade, everyone felt emboldened to say what they'd been thinking all along: America is useless. Not only has the U.S. stashed financial bombs under everyone's beds, it's doing a terrible job of cleaning up the mess--and it's certainly not in any position to give economic advice. As Hong Kong real-estate tycoon Ronnie Chan put it: "If we listen to America, we're doomed. Leaders there are pushing aside all the rational voices [calling for greater regulation], and the next crisis is already brewing."

Barack Obama will signal yet another break with his predecessor's foreign policy this week when he takes his first presidential trip to Asia. While the Bush administration focused almost exclusively on the big players like China and India, Obama is very deliberately focusing on smaller countries as well. In addition to stops in China, Japan, and South Korea, Obama will make the first visit by a U.S. president to meet leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This follows visits Hillary Clinton has already made to leading ASEAN member states, including Indonesia and Thailand, and it comes immediately after Kurt Campbell, an assistant secretary of state, last week became the highest-ranking U.S. official to hold talks in Burma in more than a decade. By comparison, Condoleezza Rice skipped two out of four ASEAN meetings. Douglas Paal at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says that when Bush visited Indonesia after Sept. 11, he was "in and out as fast as he could" and focused almost exclusively in many countries on terrorism. As Bush came to dwell more and more on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Paal says, it started to send a message that the U.S. cared about these issues to the exclusion of all others.

By Jerry Guo

The United Nations' inspection of Iran's clandestine nuclear facility outside Qum, slated as of press time for Oct. 25, was already treated as something of a coup in the West. With its air-defense batteries and centrifuges buried deep in the mountainside, the site smacked of dangerous nuclear intentions. But assuming the visit takes place, the progress it represents needs to be kept in perspective. By cooperating with the U.N., Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime gets to look as if it's opening a window on its nuclear program, slowing the momentum toward tougher international sanctions, when it's likely that Qum is only one of many secrets Iran is concealing. 

U.S. arms-control experts say that Qum is probably one of at least a half-dozen undeclared sites in Iran's "nuclear archipelago." At its present rate of production, Qum's estimated 3,000 antiquated IR-1 centrifuges would take two years to churn out enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. If Iran had another secret site, its parallel fuel cycle would cut down the waiting time to a year.

by Christopher Werth
Poland is quickly emerging as one of the few bright spots in a recession-torn Europe hit hard by the economic crisis. In a recent revision upward, the International Monetary Fund now expects Polish GDP to expand by 1 percent, making it the only European economy projected to see positive growth in 2009. And to top it all off, Warsaw just replaced Moscow on a tally of European cities as the No. 1 destination for companies looking to expand over the next five years.

To what do Poles owe the honor? Positive perceptions have gone a long way to assure investors. When the IMF was doling out emergency loans earlier this year, it instead deemed Poland worthy of a $20.5 billion flexible-credit line. Simply having that kind of rainy-day fund at hand was enough to calm markets without the government needing to withdraw a single zloty (Poland's currency), which incidentally has tumbled as much as 30 percent since last year. That's a boon to Polish exporters, and the country's large domestic market has also helped to balance trade flows and shield it from the whims of global consumers, who are starting to save rather than spend. Poland could also be benefiting from its political turbulence earlier this decade, when Jaroslaw Kaczynski reigned as prime minister (his twin brother, Lech, is still the president)--a contentious few years that may have scared off some of the "hot money" that's now wreaking havoc in neighboring Latvia and Hungary. Ironically, Poland's political woes may now be paying off.

By Stefan Theil
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has put integration at the top of her agenda, pushing for naturalization of immigrants and creating a high-powered Islam Conference that has raised the visibility of Muslim leaders in German public life. Yet last week, the OECD published a damning report on Germany's integration efforts, ranking it at or near the bottom on several measures of its ability to provide education and employment opportunities for its 15 million migrants (who make up 19 percent of the population). One painful statistic: young second-generation immigrants--who should be getting integrated through the education system--are twice as likely to be unemployed as native Germans, even when both hold a college degree. The gap was the highest among the 16 countries studied, a result that author Thomas Liebig blames on rampant discrimination.

And in the one area where the German government has direct control, it is dismally failing to follow its own exhortations to integrate: according to the same report, no country performed worse in opening its civil service to citizens with a migrant background. Second-generation migrants are joining the civil service at less than one third the rate of same-age Germans--also the biggest gap among all the countries studied. At German schools, for example, only an estimated 1 percent of teachers have a non-German background, even as the share of students with a migrant background approaches one in three countrywide. Merkel and her ministers can promote integration as much as they want, but unless they do more to open up Germany's ethnically homogenous public administration, as many other countries have done, these efforts will remain halfhearted gestures.