World News Insights: Opinion Articles

“Lebanon is a country of freedoms.” So it is. So it should be. Today, Hezbollah is its guarantor of freedoms, guaranteeing its status as a “country of freedoms.” That is what the party’s secretary-general, in his own way, said during his last speech (or has he given one since then?). The…

It is possible for the fate of a nation and people to hinge on a decision taken by the president. We, the children of the terrible Middle East know this story all too well. We know that the time of the state of institutions will not come any time soon. We know that the fate of peoples sometimes…

There are many tragic outcomes of the Syrian civil war, but the most tragic one should be the case of Syrian refugees. The events in Syria created the world’s largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. According to UNHCR, as of 31 January 2022, total number of registered Syrian…

Cryptocurrencies may be all the rage, but good luck figuring out how they fit in a portfolio. Money managers generally try to maximize gains and limit losses by estimating the expected risk and return of various investments and then assembling a mix that offers the best trade-off between risk…

There are two clashing arguments about whether the threat of economic sanctions can be effective now in deterring Russian aggression in Ukraine. One is that sanctions against Russia following the 2014 invasion of Ukraine didn’t prompt any improvement in behavior, nor did sanctions promote good…

Back in December the Chinese government notified the United Nations that its new space station had twice maneuvered out of the way of satellites belonging to Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technology Corp., or SpaceX, in 2021. Yet rather than phone SpaceX, NASA or even the White House, China leaned…

“Who lost China?” According to legend, this phrase tipped off the great foreign-policy blame game of the 1950s. 1 But in retrospect, the correct answer is pretty clear: Nobody. Because Mao Zedong and his comrades won it, fair and square. So fast forward 70 years, and maybe the question is “Who…

The judicial system was intended to be a refuge where the persecuted could seek recourse when their rights are violated and when they are slandered since it came into being in what is now a bygone era. All kinds of governance systems task their judicial institutions with presiding over disputes and…

Facebook has always been good at telling a story. After a whistle-blower revealed astonishing harm caused by the company’s products to the mental health of teens and others across the world, the company changed its name and got everyone talking about the metaverse instead. Now Mark Zuckerberg has…

China’s leaders could be forgiven for gloating a little next week, the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing. Their nation was arguably the biggest winner from Sino-American rapprochement. But it’s in danger of forgetting what made that victory possible. In…

A great and mostly unknown prophet of our time is Michael Young, whose book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” published way back in 1958, both coined the term in its title and predicted, in its fictional vision of the 21st century, meritocracy’s unhappy destination: not the serene rule of the…

On Aug. 10, 2021, days before the collapse of Afghanistan’s government, Fawad Khan Safi arrived in the United States to begin his new life. Mr. Safi, who previously worked as a contractor for the United States Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, had waited an agonizing 12 months…