World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Whatever the outcome of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the crisis it triggered may have one lasting effect: the return of war as a routine instrument of politics on a global scale. Before the invasion there was an implicit consensus that war was something that happened in the so-called …

What does President Biden think he will get out of a new nuclear deal with Iran? A year ago, the answer seemed reasonably clear to the administration: Tehran had responded to Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the original 2015 deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J…

The presidential elections in Iraq come following a difficult reform path, which was undertaken by the political and social actors since the start of the largest protest movement in the country, the early parliamentary elections, and the convening of Parliament. We are witnessing a new Iraqi…

The world has been transfixed by Ukraine’s fight for survival. As the war drags on, we’d better start considering what will become of Russia, as well. President Vladimir Putin’s nation has now been subjected to an isolation more sudden and total than that experienced by any major power in recent…

The dual crises of the global pandemic and the war in Ukraine have been testing our governments, our institutions, our diplomacy — and our collective sense of time. In part because of social media, both events already seem intolerably long, even though the Russian invasion of Ukraine is less than a…

Hanging tough against Vladimir Putin was never going to be cost free. Energy prices are soaring, firms are pulling out of Russia and those that stay are at risk of nationalization. There’s concern about global food supplies. Recession chatter has started, even as the world economy is still mopping…

As Russia’s devastation of Ukraine drags on — forcing roughly a quarter of the country’s population from their homes and fueling calls for even tougher sanctions — is China’s support for President Vladimir Putin wavering? The West should be wary of hearing the answer it wants to hear. China’s…

The build-up to a summit of European Union leaders can often be more dramatic than the result. So it was with this week’s gathering at the Versailles Palace, which failed to resolve furious debates over how to answer some big questions relating to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Another stimulus fund…

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, a friend asked me if I was planning to take my mother out of Chechnya, given the economic instability and food scarcity in the war-battered republic in southwestern Russia. I told him that she wouldn’t go without her son, daughter-in-law and…

When the first McDonald’s restaurant appeared in the Soviet Union in 1990, my parents bundled my 9-month-old sister up and waited in line for hours in the brisk Russian winter so that they could get their first taste of a Big Mac and those famed French fries. The line snaked all around Moscow’s…

Cybersecurity experts have been puzzled by the absence of a major cyberattack from Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine and in retaliation for crippling sanctions. Kremlin-backed hackers have previously shut down Ukrainian electric grids and propagated malware that caused an estimated $10…

Last week Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, released a revised estimate of the euro area’s February inflation rate. It wasn’t a happy report: Consumer prices were up 5.9 percent from a year earlier, more than most analysts had expected. And it’s going to get worse, as the effects…