World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Death holds up a mirror to everything — moments of love, stretches of strife, memories that punish and exalt. This is true if your family is far removed from the public eye, and it’s true if your family is ensconced in the world’s spotlight. Queen Elizabeth II was the matriarch both of a country…

On 6/18/2021, we all got a glimpse of four of Ebrahim Raisi's front teeth. The man who does not giggle giggled. He had been elected president of Iran. Artists and filmmakers held their breath: the hero of the 1988 executions has become president. Around five thousand men and women were executed…

On Friday, the world lost one of the wisest personalities in contemporary history. Elizabeth II, Queen of Britain, passed away at the age of 96 in Scotland’s Balmoral Castle, only a day after she had confirmed Lizz Truss as the new prime minister. During her seventy years of reign over Britain and…

We have been hearing talk that Iran will cooperate ever since the term of US President Barack Obama. In the region, we have been hearing these remarks since the time of Hashemi and Rafsanjani, and now the Europeans and American administration are repeating them. Of course, none of this…

The summer of war in Ukraine, while brutal for soldiers and civilians on the front lines, has been experienced from afar as a stalemate, depressing enough in its grinding sameness to slip out of American headlines for a time. The autumn and winter will be different, supplying answers to the two…

Some Arab politicians and journalists have been frequently using the term "old continent" recently, often in the context of mocking Europe's current troubles. The challenging problems Europe is facing as a result of the Russian war on Ukraine go beyond the acute shortage of energy supplies,…

Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of…

To function in an otherwise normal democracy, a hereditary monarchy requires that the citizenry accept a bit of fiction — namely that one family, standing above politics, can represent the nation and its values. That takes a bit of doing, especially with that most scrutinized royal house of them…

Liz Truss isn’t Boris Johnson. That was the main crumb of comfort for European Union diplomats and leaders as congratulations from Paris to Helsinki flowed to the new resident of 10 Downing Street. After years of Johnson’s antics, from threats over post-Brexit trade to calling the French “turds,”…

The West isn’t exactly at war with Russia. However, it isn’t exactly not at war, either. Western weapons have helped Ukraine to stall Russia’s invasion and even to counterattack, while Western economic sanctions have clearly created serious problems for Russian industry. Russia has retaliated…

For the second time in a week, NASA scrubbed the launch of the Space Launch System designed to return Americans to the moon. First conceived in 2010, and initially scheduled to have its first test flight in 2017, the rocket is now scheduled to take off no earlier than late September, and possibly…

Strip away the weird semi-fascist optics, the creepy crimson lighting and the Marines standing sentinel, and the speech Joe Biden gave on Thursday night outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall could have been given by other prominent Democrats throughout the Trump era. The song is always the…