Sarah Palin may not have much experience with the rest of the world—she didn’t even hold a passport until well after her 40th birthday—but the rest of the world has had enough experience with her to know exactly what it thinks. Those thoughts range from mild bemusement to borderline horror. Much of the world, especially in Europe, has spent the last four years counting down the days until President Bush’s final hours in office, and for them, Palin’s folksy ways carry too many echoes of the sitting president. That sentiment doesn't rule out the possibility of a little satirical fun at Palin's expense, of course.

The sober-minded Brits find a perverse appeal in her plain-spoken ways. "She could never exist in the British political system," says London Times columnist and former political satirist Alice Miles. "Or we don't think she could. We're all men in suits saying very, very safe things." Her exoticism has obsessed many, including tennis coach Jack Garvey, who admits to staying up until two a.m. to catch the vice-presidential debate last week. "I found myself shouting at the screen, imploring someone to push her on a few issues," he says. "But everyone was too polite to challenge her. The idea of her facing off against Putin or being in any way near power is just frightening." Even her fashion choices offend the Isles; the Guardian dedicated an entire column to her Alaska-shaped earrings, which, "with terrifying literal-mindedness...express everything we need to know about her pride in her roots and her people."

Across the Atlantic, optimistic Republicans might have hoped for a bit of favorable coverage in Brazil, where evangelical Christians are the fastest-growing religious group. No luck. Palin's been lampooned in cartoons there, and Sergio Augusto, a columnist for the daily newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, joked that "judging by appearances alone, [Palin] could have swapped politics for synchronized swimming or been singing covers of 'Pink Shoelaces.'" Win or lose, Palin should exercise sound judgment in determining how best to make use of her new passport.

With reporting from Barbie Nadeau in Italy, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Sophie Grove in London and Mac Margolis in Brazil

Journalists everywhere are lamenting the loss of profits and influence at some of the world's best papers. They might take some solace in the fact that printed cartoons, at least, still matter. The intentionally provocative Danish cartoons that depicted the prophet Mohammed unflatteringly stirred the Muslim world into riots and rampage. The United States proved it wasn't immune to animation anxiety when a satirical New Yorker cover depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a secret Muslim caused an eruption of protest. The latest offender is a South African cartoonist named Zapiro, the pen name of Jonathan Shapiro. His most recent work shows Jacob Zuma, the leader of the African National Congress, preparing to rape a woman symbolizing the justice system. His most avid supporters are seen holding the victim in place and egging on their leader. 

The cartoon, which appeared in Sunday's Times, has dominated the national discussion this week because of its close echoing of reality. Zuma has populist appeal -- he won the party leadership from president Thabo Mbeki last December by embracing leftist policies popular with the poor -- but is embroiled in conflict. In May, he was acquitted of raping a friend's HIV-positive daughter. To make matters worse, Zuma, who claimed the sex was consensual, admitted that he knew she had HIV, but neglected to use a condom anyway. He claimed that by taking a cold shower afterward, he didn't have to worry about contracting the virus.  

Zuma is now on trial for corruption charges stemming from a controversial 1999 arms deal; if he's convicted, he'll be forced to drop out of the presidential election, which he's expected to win. Many have alleged that Zuma and his supporters are using their powers to influence the outcome. The leader of the ANC's Youth League, Julius Malema, vowed this week to "eliminate any force" blocking Zuma's path to the presidency. Although Zuma urged restraint on his followers, protests in support of him turned violent on Wednesday, with a mob of 3,000 in Durban throwing water bombs at police, who responded with rubber bullets and widespread arrests. It was the fear of this kind of activity that led to Sunday's cartoon. "I am outraged at what Jacob Zuma is trying to do to the justice system and constitutional principles," Zapiro told a South African radio station. 

I had a wide-ranging interview last week at the Republican convention with Randy Scheunemann, John McCain’s director of foreign policy and national security. We had to slim down the text for the print magazine, but the director’s cut would have included a few other sections. Here are some noteworthy excerpts:

(1) I asked Scheunemann to respond to the critique that McCain helped egg Mikheil Saakashvili on.

It’s been suggested that Saakashvili, although he’s victim, felt emboldened to goad the Russians because of the support he heard from Washington and McCain. Is there any culpability on this side of the pond?

This is the classic blame-America first argument. I disagree with the premise of the question—that existing tensions in South Ossetia could suggest culpability on the part of the Georgians. The reality is that in cases of naked cross-border aggression, the aggressor will always seek to blame the victim. The Sudeten Germans had real grievances, too.Is Georgia at fault because it had the audacity to hope to join the NATO alliance? It has become clear in the aftermath of the Russian invasion that this wasn’t about what happened on August 6 in South Ossetia. This is about the nature of the democratic regime in Georgia that the Russians want to bring down. They’ve called Saakashvili a political corpse, they’ve refused to deal with him, and if the international community tolerates that behavior, it will only embolden the Russians in other places. That’s why the Poles, the Baltic states, and the Ukrainians are worried.

Put it this way: would the Russians have been as eager to take down Saakashvili on the day he was inaugurated as in the week before they invaded, by which point his rhetoric toward Russia had changed? And did the West help change his rhetoric?

Almost from the beginning of the Saakashvili administration, Putin’s Russia has sought to undermine his regime. Among the actions that the Russians have taken is cutting off energy supplies, cutting off electricity, not allowing the import of Georgian products—wine, water—and putting a trade embargo on Georgia, supporting the separatist regimes that were unrecognized until recently in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They do not really recognize the independence of Georgia. They are trying to create a past historical era—not the Soviet Union, but the tsarist empire. Putin doesn’t want the 20th century, he wants the 19th century, and he’s been quite explicit about his goals. And to blame the victim for the actions of the aggressor shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what happens when aggression goes unpunished. It emboldens aggressors.

Barely a month ago, some 4 million Bolivians went to the polls to cast ballots in an historic recall vote to see who was boss and who would be shown the door in South America's poorest and easily its most conflagrated nation. Now we know the outcome: Exactly nothing has been settled, which is far from good. In Bolivia stalemate is a heartbeat from conflagration.

You'll recall that after the ballots were counted three provincial governors, including the outspoken  Manfred Reyes, of Cochabamba, were sent packing by voters sympathetic to president Evo Morales. Beyond that, the result was a wash. A garlanded Morales emerged from the voting booths boasting a solid majority in the national tally (67 percent in the official count, much less according to independent sources) and enormous support in the highland provinces, where he is still immensely popular among the indigenous majority. Morales dedicated his triumph to "the revolutionary peoples of the world." At the same time, the dogged opposition governors handily won their own votes of confidence in the country's lowland provinces of Tarija, Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz, a wealthy crescent (aka, Media Luna) of territory blessed with natural gas and fertile soils.

In other parts of democratic Latin America, such a standoff might lead to a spasm of pique and protests, giving way to truce and eventually dialogue, with all parties acknowledging the plusses of entente over implosion. Not in Bolivia, where too often civil disobedience comes with the whiff of tear gas and a body count. A surge of roadblocks and pickets in La Paz, starting in 2003, ended up in bloody street clashes that claimed some 70 lives and toppled two presidents in as many years.

So inflamed were protesters in the Media Luna the other day that they swarmed the landing strip where a presidential helicopter was scheduled to land, literally driving Morales out of the country. (La Paz chalked up the detour to "technical problems" with the presidential helicopter.) He landed instead in Guajará Mirim, a town in the Brazilian Amazon, where he was rescued by a Bolivian air force and flown back to La Paz. "Never have I seen the country so close to civil war," a Latin American official with the World Economic Forum told me the other day.

Civil war may not be in the cards. But neither is bonhomie or reconciliation. The Morales administration has already won enemies in the wealthy lowlands by commandeering what his foes say is an inordinate share of taxes on gas and oil. Now Morales is upping the ante by trying to muscle through a referendum on the new constitution, a document which was drafted behind closed doors (the opposition was locked out of the assembly hall and then boycotted the final revision proceedings) earlier this year. The new charter calls for a sweeping land reform program and political  "autonomy" for the indigenous majority. Wary of the impedimenta of democracy, Morales recently issued an executive order--Supreme Decree 29691--to make sure the constitution comes to a popular vote in December.

The Bolivian electoral court saw things differently and, in a rare sign of independence, overruled the initiative on September 2, arguing that only Congress has the authority to call a referendum. Morales has pledged to overturn the court ruling.

For anyone wondering what a seemingly arcane and partisan dustup in the rarefied Andean air has to do with the rest of the planet, these recent events are instructive. "The fate of the continent will not be written in the Andes," I once heard a senior Brazilian diplomat announce, whiskey in one hand and the other waving out the window at the snowcaps of La Paz. That was then.

Bolivia sits on some 1.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, the second largest reserves in the continent, making this nation stretched between tropical jungle and towering glaciers into the newest Latin energy sultanate. Half the natural gas burned by Brazilian industry is pumped from the Bolivian fields, where protesters routinely threaten to cut off supplies and sabotage pipelines. Petrobras, the Brazilian oil monopoly, and Bolivia's biggest investor, has been scrambling to ramp up alternative sources for its awakening economy. Energy strapped Argentina would be in dire straights if the Bolivian pipeline was shut down. No wonder foreign investment has slowed to a trickle.

Diplomats in both nations downplay the threat, arguing that even the hottest heads will pause before cutting the country's lifeline; after all, all the natural gas in the world is good to no one unless it is retrieved and sold for precious foreign exchange. But in a land where tear gas often trumps confetti, few people are betting on the outcome.

By Jaimie Seaton

Yesterday, when Thailand’s Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej declared emergency rule, I took a break from reporting, ran to the store and grabbed batteries and candles. After all, anti-government demonstrators calling themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy were threatening chaos. They said they’d cut water and power, halt rail and air traffic and organize sympathetic trade unions to stage a crippling general strike. I awoke the next morning expecting gridlock, blackouts and chaos on Bangkok’s streets. But the threats turned out to be empty. The biggest news: one Thai Airways flight was canceled because the crew said it wasn’t 'feeling ready' to fly. Otherwise, it was a perfectly normal day. As the Bangkok Post put it, “the strike fizzled.”

ST. PAUL, Minn.--The GOP foreign policy message men here are almost as on-message as the Sarah Palin defenders. But at an International Republican Institute Panel today, éminences grises bickered just a little bit about Iran and North Korea. Yet the most revealing moment was when moderator Jim Kolbe, a former Arizona congressman, asked the panelists what they would tell the new president if summoned on his first day to help set priorities. Each recommendation got at a critique conservatives have harbored toward the Bush administration:

• Brent Scowcroft, the über-realist national security adviser to George H.W. Bush (who has been neutral in the McCain-Obama contest) said, “The first thing to deal with is Iraq.” Not surprisingly, stability (not democracy) is the first goal.
• Richard Burt, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former ambassador to East Germany, started with the Middle East: “Don’t wait, as did your two predecessors, to work on Israel and Palestine. It won’t transform the strategic situation, but it’ll certainly help, especially with moderates in the region.”
• John Lehman, a former Navy secretary, brought his experience on the 9/11 Commission to bear. “Get your appointees in the top 100 national security slots as soon as possible,” he counseled. “Bush had only 30 percent of the key slots filled on 9/11.”
• Richard Williamson, the special envoy to Sudan and Reagan administration operative, hinted at the Bush bubble described by rebels like Paul O’Neill and John DiIulio: “Listen to a variety of perspectives, and not just from people in government.”
• Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, insisted that the president should lead. He didn’t say it, but the implication was that, in the post-Iraq years, on issues from North Korea to Libya, he has followed other countries’ diplomatic initiatives.
• Lawrence Eagleburger, Reagan’s secretary of state, thinks that U.S. resources are stretched too thin, and that U.S. foreign policy is too dilettantish: “The United States has spent too much time, resources, and attention on too many plans and needs to reduce its activities internationally. Do we need troops in Haiti, for example?”

Some of these people offered gentle criticism during the Bush era (Scowcroft and, to a lesser extent, Eagleburger expressed doubts about the war; Lehman had a 9/11 Commissioner’s frustrations with the president’s refusal to implement his recommendations), but it’s hard not to wonder: where were these people during the last eight years?

It's the sort of thing that almost makes you long for the days of the samurai. Those guys had swords, and strong beliefs, and, well, cojones. Certainly not like modern-day Japanese prime ministers. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe quit last year after less than a year on the job. And now his predecessor, Yasuo Fukuda,  announced his resignation last night here in Tokyo, also after a little less than a year.

It wasn't just that Fukuda left so quickly. Japan has gone through periods before when there was plenty of turnover among senior politicians, such as the 1990s, when no one had any bright ideas for pulling Japan out of its seemingly endless recession. Fukuda's departure was different. It was ignominious. Pitiful. Wimpy.