The Perfect Storm
The modern world faces a perfect storm: the combination of a deadly and highly infectious virus, an emerging worldwide economic depression, the collapse of global governance, and an absence of coordinated and effective international response. Yet in this crisis there is also an opportunity. IF EVER …
Judy Asks: Should Europe Have Common Debt?
How to deal with the economic costs of the coronavirus is dividing the eurozone countries once again. Italy and Spain, the EU countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, are the countries with the most limited space for response. Spain just recovered from one of the deepest financial crises i…
Wood energy as a climate change solution
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will soon issue a regulation governing how carbon dioxide emissions from wood burned for energy (“biomass”) will be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Depending on who you ask, biomass is either worse than fossil fuels and helps to destroy our fo…
The Leadership Failure That Will Cost Us Everything
If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that delaying prudent policymaking does not merely result in higher marginal costs down the road. Rather, it puts us on an entirely different trajectory – one that all too easily can end in catastrophe. NEW YORK – COVID-19’s exponential growth has already of…
Millions more children at risk with immunization services disrupted amid COVID-19 pandemic
Making its call at the start of the 2020 edition of World Immunization Week, UNICEF said on Saturday that millions of children are in danger of missing life-saving vaccines against measles, diphtheria and polio due to disruptions in immunization service as the world rushes to slow the spread of COVI…
IMF, EU 3bn Loan Welcomed in Balkans Despite Unknowns
EU candidate countries from the region have greeted an offer of 3 billion euros in emergency loans to deal with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic – although the terms of the loans have yet to be clarified. EU candidate states from the West Balkans have welcomed the offer of 3 billion euros in e…
Fifty Thousand Americans Dead from the Coronavirus, and a President Who Refuses to Mourn Them
In just the past few days, President Trump has blamed immigrants, China, the “fake news” and, of course, “the invisible enemy” of the coronavirus for America’s present troubles. He has opined extemporaneously about his plans to hold a grand Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall and has ann…
Great Power Populism
The fusion of populism and great power rivalries introduces an additional degree of unpredictability in an international affairs environment already beset by a condition reminiscent of an individual in the midst of a nervous breakdown, itself due at least in part to ongoing strategic realignment and…
Weekend Roundup: Time to Redefine Defense and Redesign Global Cooperation
Geopolitical orders, including the balance of power, arise to contain threats and promote the interests of nations that benefit from the stability they maintain. The present order is still primarily a legacy of past world wars. National arsenals and multilateral institutions established to fortify t…
Security for a Post-Pandemic World
In the pandemic, for the first time in living memory, humanity is confronting a common threat that it must defeat collectively. Most arguments currently revolve around the cost of that victory in terms of loss of life and economic damage. The disruption will indeed be huge, comparable only to that w…