Things worth reading | 5 January 2009

The economic crisis is so bad that it is often easy to forget that the foreign policy challenges that so dominated the news a year or so ago have not gone away. The mission in Afghanistan will present General Petraeus with an even tougher challenge than Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions will have to be confronted or accepted sometime soon, this year we will find out what happens in China when the economy stumbles, Russia still seems intent on reasserting its dominance in its near abroad and there is—of course—the problems in the Middle East that have so dominated the news in the past few days. So, I’m very glad that my old home Foreign Policy has launched a set of blogs that promise to be required reading on these topics.

If I had to narrow down my recommendations, there are three I’d steer you to in particular. The one by Thomas