On Sunday, January 19, the small city of Nago in northern Okinawa re-elected their mayor. Americans especially will wonder why a local election in a far-off place should matter. Because by voting for Mayor Susumu Inamine people voted against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the United States military. Local fishermen and farmers voted yes to their traditional way of life, no to American helicopters polluting the pristine waters of Oura Bay.

Egypt will hold a presidential poll this year before parliamentary elections, interim president Adly Mansour said Sunday, in a move seen to benefit army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The election process would have to start before mid-April, according to a timetable included in a constitution adopted in a referendum this month.

Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”

As discussions about post-2014 U.S. presence in Afghanistan continue, so do concerns about the country’s ability to stand on its own. The Afghan people and their government will determine the direction of the country. And as that future is discussed, so is the question of what will happen to 50 percent of country’s population: women.

Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly is close to passing a new Constitution that legislators across the political spectrum, human rights organizations and constitutional experts are hailing as a triumph of consensus politics. Two years in the making and now in its third draft, the charter is a carefully worded blend of ideas that has won the support of both Ennahda, the Islamist party that leads the interim government, and the secular opposition. It is being hailed as one of the most liberal constitutions in an Arab nation.

In 2010, I sat across the table from Assistant US Trade Representative Barbara Weisel, who was responsible for negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the mega-regional free-trade treaty among Vietnam, Malaysia, and ten other Pacific Rim countries that President Barack Obama’s administration wants to conclude in the coming weeks.

With the fog of war not yet lifted, the news out of Iraq's Anbar province remains ambiguous. What little we can see, however, does not look good. Al Qaeda in Iraq -- along with significant elements of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) -- has been able to take over government buildings in Ramadi, Fallujah, and Karmah. In response, government forces have amassed outside these cities and are preparing for an operation that could reverberate in Iraq's nascent democracy long into the future.

With the rise of al-Qaeda, increasingly repressive regimes, and weak, even collapsing states, the Arab Spring is looking more and more like a nightmare for U.S. security interests. Perhaps, then, it makes some sense that the Obama administration would increase security assistance to the Middle East, from 69 percent of the total budget request for 2014 to 80 percent. However, this also entails a significant reduction in democracy assistance to the region, which will drop from $459.2 million to $298.3 million. Congress might further deepen these cuts.