World News Insights: Opinion Articles

You can’t buck the market, the late UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said. In a different context, US heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson observed that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Both were expressing variations of the same principle. Faced with an unopposable…

If war is tragic, it is also an opportunity for change. That is why the history of wars, especially European wars- from the Napoleonic ones to World War Two- is seen as a history of transitions from one world to another, one set of social, cultural, and artistic norms to another. Only in despotic,…

The Syrian conflict marked its eleventh anniversary on Tuesday. Putting aside the enormous suffering endured by the Syrian people, what is also striking is that international efforts to achieve a settlement have lost steam over the past few years. A few weeks ago, I had settled on the theme of…

The world's leading climate scientists have issued six assessments of the state of climate-change knowledge since 1990. The first five were influential, driving efforts to build global climate agreements. The sixth report, issued four days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, has been largely…

At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable. A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and…

It’s March. Major Chinese cities are in lockdown, manufacturing is idled, shares are plummeting, and the supply chain is scrambling to make sense of it all. It is a disturbing kind of deja vu. Today’s Covid-19 surge in China appears to mirror the Wuhan outbreak that paralyzed the world in 2020…

“Democracies are rising to the moment,” US President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address, as Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his vicious war on Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama leads a band of commentators claiming that the “spirit of 1989” is back and we are about to witness…

I will have the privilege of spending today, Tuesday, March 15, with members of the Syrian community in Manchester, UK. We will be celebrating the talent and creativity of Syrian artists in the UK and Syria’s fantastically rich culture and heritage, so overshadowed in the last decade by the war and…

Partisan gerrymandering in the computer age has undermined majoritarian democracy — that much is clear. Using algorithms to give one party a numeric advantage over another is more effective than old-fashioned gerrymandering done by hand, and reduces the number of competitive districts for the House…

A decision to cut off the flow of technology goods and services to Russia, among a raft of restrictions set in motion in response to the invasion of Ukraine, might not amount to much. It will take time before the moves have any impact, and there are ways to circumvent the sanctions’ effects. Yet…

In September 1983, Stanislav Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet military, assigned to the command center that monitored early-warning satellites over the United States. During one of his shifts, the alarms went off: The Americans had seemingly launched five Minuteman intercontinental…

The great NATO enlargement debate never ends. In the 1990s, US officials and academics argued about whether pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe was likely to sustain the post-Cold War peace or prematurely end it. More recently, critics have charged that Russia’s war…