World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

Paul Krugman

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…

Adam Minter

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…

Ross Douthat

As countries across the world look to grab their share of the electric vehicle supply chain in a rush to go green, energy storage is becoming a key battleground. To add to the pressure, yet another large Chinese battery player is emerging. China Aviation Lithium Battery Technology Co., or CALB,…

Anjani Trivedi

Tehran has an iron grip over its map. It utilizes every means available to ward off any rivals seeking to encroach on this map, and it takes firm actions against those who try to create gaps within them or cut them up. Tehran’s maps hit a wall built by Istanbul five years ago, with the latter…

Mustafa Fahs

“One would think the Tsar is back!” This is how a colleague covering the G 8 summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2006 commented after a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the facilities provided for journalists covering the “historic event.” Historic because this was the first time that Russia,…

Amir Taheri

On our first morning at the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, the air was eerily still. The captain of our research icebreaker, encouraged by the calm, made a bold choice: Our ship would hold close to the ice shelf so that the sonar system would peer a little ways beneath it while generating a…

Elizabeth Rush

The world of management is abuzz about the idea of “quiet quitting” — the Gen Z, TikTok-boosted term for doing nothing more at work than the job description demands. Of course, there’s nothing new about this phenomenon — if Gen Z knew how to dial a call, they would understand the age-old…

Gearoid Reidy

Britain’s longest-serving monarch has died. It feels like a death in the family. Born in 1926, the year that John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television, and crowned in 1953, the year of Joseph Stalin’s death, the Queen has been with us for so long that only a sliver of…

Adrian Wooldridge

Much time has been spent asking, after each of Israel’s weekly airstrikes on Syrian territory: Why does the Syrian regime refrain from retaliating? The fact is that hardly a week goes by without an Israeli airstrike on various targets in Syria, mostly those operated by the IRGC or the…

Hussam Itani

Jared Kushner may be Donald Trump’s son-in-law, but he is not like him. He’s calm. He listens more than he speaks. He is believed to have been the mastermind behind the first election campaign, which ended with the shocking and once unimaginable victory of Trump. Certainly, Trump lacks in official…

Abdulrahman Al-Rashed

A decision Monday by a federal judge granting former President Donald Trump’s request for an independent review of the FBI’s seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago last month has prompted an unusually forceful backlash within the legal community. It isn’t just partisan analysts who are reacting with…

Jonathan Bernstein