World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The OPEC+ group of oil producers celebrated their fifth birthday in early December. It’s been a turbulent time — more so than they could have imagined when they first came together to face the threat posed by the US shale boom back in 2016 — and the future doesn’t look much easier. On the verge…

Amsterdam’s historical significance for global capitalism is hard to overstate. It created the stock market, the tulip bubble and a mega-corporation so big it had its own money, army and colony. Economists later wondered if there was something almost spiritual in the way the Dutch took to money. …

Critics of the Biden administration last summer said the withdrawal from Afghanistan would destroy American credibility and encourage America’s rivals to take bolder actions that would challenge America and its friends. Is reduced American credibility the reason for new tensions in Ukraine and…

The most significant development in the international security of Asia in 2021 was the announcement of AUKUS, a new trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The announcement on September 15 by the three Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking countries…

The departure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel after 16 years at the helm leaves a gaping hole in both European politics and the European Union. Heralded as a beacon of stability during stormy times, Merkel’s multilateralist and compromise-based approach steered the EU through many high seas,…

Article 10 of the Washington Treaty of 1949, stipulates that any European State can be invited to join, on condition that there is consensus among the Allies. This basic principle stands. In 1990’s NATO became the sanctuary for former Warsaw Pact countries seeking protection. After consecutive…

Would we be exaggerating if we said that the United Nation Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is at the top of the long list of things Hezbollah hates? We’ll delay answering this question to offer a reminder of what happened a few days ago in the border town of Shakra in South Lebanon: a clash…

Joan Didion was a writer uniquely attuned to the disorder and fragmentation of our times, the dizzying changes overtaking America since the 1960s, when, as she wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” lines from Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming” reverberated “in my inner ear as if they were…

With inflation running at more than 6 percent and President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in peril, ’tis the season for second-guessing. So I’d like to focus on what may well have been the original sin of the Biden administration and the narrow Democratic majority in Congress: last February’s…

No one will miss the year that is taking its last breaths. If one had the opportunity to cross it out of their life, they would in a heartbeat. The joy of living lies in being normal, warm and beautiful; for setbacks to be acceptable and tolerable. Living behind facemasks is not enjoyable even…

I recently found myself in a conversation with a libertarian journalist who was visiting Vienna. “Should we be surprised that Austria decided to lock down the unvaccinated and that the government is pushing for mandatory vaccination?” he bellowed at me. “Was it not the Austrians and the Germans who…

At this point in the pandemic, many Americans remain unvaccinated because they believe the coronavirus vaccine is unlikely to do them any good. They’re aware of the virus and the damage it can cause, but for any number of reasons, they simply don’t believe they should get a vaccine. We’ve spoken to…