World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood last month atop India’s nearly completed new Parliament building, built to mark the country’s 75 years of independence, and pulled a lever. A sprawling red curtain fell back to reveal the structure’s crowning statue. Many across India gasped. The 21-foot-tall…

At that moment, the state, its military and security institutions in particular, did the minimum and stood by. It did not intervene in the battle over power and wealth waged by the belligerents, and according to eyewitnesses, a state that fails to monopolize violence becomes hostage to the factions…

It’s no surprise that for US allies in Asia, “Top Gun: Maverick” is the year’s most-watched American movie, topping the box office in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The simple tale of US might and gumption against an evil faceless opponent certainly resonates in a region that’s facing intensifying…

“Prepare for the end of abundance!” This is the message that French President Emmanuel Macron offered in his first post-holiday pronouncement last week. Though supposedly addressed at the French people, Macron’s lamentation seemed to have the entire “Western world” in mind. According to him…

There have been two surreal visitations in Washington that left people quivering with excitement. The first was seven decades ago, when a spaceship landed on the Mall and an alien and a large silver robot got out. Hollywood moviemakers had come to do location filming for the 1951 sci-fi classic …

The End of History was supposed to have happened back in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama announced the conclusive triumph of liberal democracy. We know how that thesis worked out. But what happens when the other kind of History — academic, not Hegelian — starts to collapse?…

The recent extensive armed confrontations, the storming of the Presidential Palace that is a state symbol, and the casualties have all made Baghdad a more dangerous city than before. Despite the army’s intervention, the removal of road blockades, and the cessation of clashes, Iraq’s near future is…

Today, on the 1st of September, Lebanon sees the term of its president end. It is true that Article 73 of the Lebanese constitution leaves it up to the Parliamentary Speaker to choose a day this month to hold a parliamentarian session to elect a new president, and he will probably bide his time in…

“Welcome, welcome!” My guide, Philip, waves at me from his seat in a virtual conference room, where he’s wearing a green shirt and sitting at a desk. I’m at Facebook’s Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California, wearing Meta Platform Inc.’s Quest 2 headset. Philip is in another room there…

Mikhail Gorbachev was a man who hoped for the best, and got the worst. The legacy of the last Soviet leader, who died yesterday aged 91, was largely undone by two decades of Vladimir Putin. Now a grinding war in Ukraine is its grim and bloody requiem. Gorbachev had an aversion to violence, a…

Four decades ago I spent a year working in the US government, on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. (For those wondering: Yes, this was the Reagan administration; no, I wasn’t a Republican.) It was a technocratic job. I was the chief international economist; the chief domestic…

There’s been a lot of talk of shifting the manufacturing supply chain away from China. Other countries want to cut their dependence on the world’s biggest factory floor, wary that Beijing is wielding too much power over the global economy. Rebuilding manufacturing and replacing China, though, isn’t…