North Korea

"Nathan Gardels is now also one of the veterans of the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 1985, he founded the periodical New Perspectives Quarterly, which has been available since 1999 at www.digitalnpq.org and is allegedly read by 35 million people in fifteen languages. This is also the principle that Berggruen follows with his institute: Former heads of state, ministers, and diplomats comment on current world events. Almost forgotten figures like the former head of the UN arms control commission Hans Blix have emerged from obscurity. In New Perspectives Quarterly, the politician, who is now almost 90 years old, explains the similarities between North Korea and Iran. Gardels' "Club of Wise Old Men" aims to provide a spectrum of opinions on conflict topics, just like the Club of Rome. Thus, the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who chaired the influential private US think tank Council on Foreign Relations from 1977 to 1981, at the age of 90, is just as wise and cosmopolitan as Helmut Schmidt, Abolhassam Banisadr, the first elected president of Iran, comments for New Perspectives Quarterly on the Hollywood film Argo, and Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, explains why Arab democracy cannot be of American influence. Alongside the old guard, Nathan Gardels also allows writers such as Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, w"

"In November 2003, while the tests continued, Gibbs took off for another overseas adventure; this time to war-torn Afghanistan. Societies exposed to extreme regimes continued to fascinate him. Since visiting North Korea in 1999, he’d explored Bhutan, the closed society in the Himalayas, and Albania, the small country that for most of the twentieth century had tried to turn its back on modernity. In 2003, the great issue of the moment was the War on Terror, with Iraq and Afghanistan the primary theatres of the great struggle. Quite aside from the opportunity to witness Afghanistan’s contemporary travails first-hand, Gibbs was attracted by the rich layering of history that he expected to find in a region that had provided the traditional crossroads for Asia for millennia. In London Emma had met Robert Pelton, a Canadian journalist who specialised in books and articles about the world’s most dangerous places.[14](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477408-606132179-14) Gibbs proposed a deal; he’d pay Pelton’s airfare to Afghanistan if he showed them around. Thus began one of his great adventures."

"Much of his historical and biographical reading is directed by his travel. A favourite Gibbs aphorism is, ‘The more interests you have, the more interesting life is.’ ‘To see Yugoslavia, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan after the Taliban fell over, the copper mines north of Santiago, or to travel with the kids through areas of north India where they were fighting,’ he argues, ‘is a great source of stimulus. The consequence is that whenever you see anything about those places in the news, you’re interested.’ A biography of the great Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley is much more interesting when you’re just about to visit the Congo."