World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In contrast with the many myths about those soldiers’ heroism and magnanimity, wars bring out the worst in people. In this sense, those with a military makeup win the first battle, though not the last, by the mere fact of having dragged those with a non-military makeup to war. The former drag the…

Nobody knows how Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine will end, but most scenarios range from bad to worse. To grasp them, start by considering what is indubitably the world’s most notorious rat. That’s the one Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he once — as a boy in what was then…

Even before Russia invaded Ukraine the economy felt pretty dicey. There was inflation, a weird post-pandemic job market, and the prospect of a more hawkish Fed. Now markets are even more volatile as sanctions roil the global outlook. For anyone counting the days until retirement, it’s been a…

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine will have momentous consequences for many — above all for Ukrainians, those who are fleeing the country and those who have stayed to fight off the invading army or to helplessly endure the devastation. But the effect on Russians, too, will be enormous, whether or not…

If you stand on a small lane at the west end of Taipei’s Songshan airport at just the right moment, you can feel the hot air of a jet engine as it begins its takeoff run. On any given weekend, before the pandemic, dozens of people could be found milling about waiting for the next brief thrill as…

Apple Inc., Nike Inc. and Walt Disney Co. are among the raft of big consumer brands deciding to halt sales in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. While that sounds like an appropriate response to Moscow’s brutality, it also smells of opportunism. More than a dozen major corporations have…

The Russia-Ukraine war has now gone to its second week. As the war is prolonged, many believe that Putin has miscalculated and that Russia’s war machine will now be stopped by the sanctions of the European Union and NATO. Ranking 22nd out of a list of military capabilities of 140 countries,…

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, cryptocurrency fans appeared to be trapped in a decadent fantasy. A batch of CryptoPunk NFTs (blockchain collectibles) had just been yanked from auction at Sotheby’s amid fading enthusiasm and a broader market sell-off. The seller tweeted Drake memes to…

As Joe Biden campaigned for the White House in 2020, he knew that the next president of the United States would govern under circumstances significantly more daunting than those that most faced. As he took the oath of office in 2021, he could see very clearly — in the tally of Covid-related…

Hong Kong feels like it’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and it’s tempting to ask how much more people can take. With reports circulating that authorities will impose some form of lockdown later this month, supermarket shelves are once again being stripped bare and long lines have formed…

It is not a hasty conclusion or a kind of simplification to consider Russia’s war on Ukraine to be a turning point for Russia’s relations with the West, creating a total rupture and replacing dialogue and cooperation with quiet hostility. In other words, those who thought the Cold War ended with…

The world is watching in horror what Putin and his people still call a “special military operation” and what the vast majority of the world rightly calls military intervention and invasion of an independent and sovereign state. An extraordinary virtual summit of NATO Heads of State and…