For Trump, a meeting with Kim is the ultimate test
President Trump, popping unannounced into the White House briefing room late Thursday, apparently just couldn’t contain himself — and with good reason. A senior South Korean delegation had just spent the afternoon with the President and his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, carrying a remar…
The Trap of Empire and Authoritarianism
For thousands of years the tragedy of politics has been that empire affords the answer to chaos. Imperialism, as the Oxford historian John Darwin says, “has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history,” as the capabilities needed to build strong states, owing to the pa…
How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy
There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society and politics remain the same. Then there a…
After the Olympics, the Chinese Reach Out
Before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, there were fears that North Korea would do something provocative during the games. Instead, the opposite happened. North Korea still stole the show, but it did so by using the Olympics to signal its openness to reconciliation with South Korea. With the closing …
Afghanistan ready to play connector role in Eurasian integration
One of the top roller-coaster sagas in what, some years ago, I christened Pipelineistan, has yielded a definitive twist. The US$8 billion,1,814-kilometer Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI) was officially inaugurated on Friday, in full pomp, and with proceedings broadca…
The Munich Conference Grapples with America’s ‘Burden Shedding’
Those with experience of attending previous Munich Security Conferences have described the mood of the 2018 conclave with terms like “retrenchment” and “hunkering down” and “waiting out the uncertainty.” A theme constantly repeated during the three-day gathering was that of the liberal world order u…
Why Democrats Are Obsessed with Russia
The issue of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has intensified an already deep and bitter partisan divide. Democrats and the broader progressive community argue that a hostile nation worked to defeat Hillary Clinton and install a president that Moscow could influen…
The World Bank Needs to Return to Its Mission
The World Bank declares that its mission is to end extreme poverty within a generation and to boost shared prosperity. These goals are universally agreed as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. But the World Bank lacks an SDG strategy, and now it is turning to Wall Street to please its politic…
Israel’s ‘air strikes’ in Sinai show its growing Arab ties
Over the weekend the New York Times carried a fascinating scoop. Under the headline “Secret Alliance: Israel Carries Out Airstrikes in Egypt, With Cairo’s O.K.” its correspondent, David D. Kirkpatrick provided details of a remarkable and highly secret military relationship. “For more than two years,…
The One Phone Call Qatar Desperately Wants Donald Trump to Make
Top officials from the tiny, embattled Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar came to Washington this week with a simple message to President Donald Trump: You can solve the regional crisis that has seen it blockaded by all their neighbors with a single phone call. “The sooner, the better, the phone call,” s…