World News Insights: Opinion Articles

At this point, you’re probably trying very hard to tread more lightly on this weary and fragile earth. But no matter how much organic produce you buy, or how much plastic you’ve eliminated, or how many native trees you’ve planted, the future seems bleaker and bleaker. The relentless destruction of…

I want to tell you about the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), a cause that I believe in and have contributed to. I was a moody and listless adolescent who had a hard time following through with anything. This felt like a chronic condition until I walked into a debate…

The foreign-policy journalist Joshua Keating used to write a series for Slate called “If It Happened There,” in which he reported on political and cultural developments in the United States in the tone of an American foreign correspondent sending dispatches from a nation on the other side of the…

When I became the supreme military commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2009, the alliance was focused on the war in Afghanistan. But one of the first senior delegations to visit me came to discuss Russia: the military chiefs of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. I’ll never forget…

There are two kinds of negotiations with Iran for a nuclear deal. We have the negotiations of the meeting in Vienna and what I called the Vienna meeting’s shadow negotiations. The former is attended by Iran, the US and Western powers. As for the negotiations in the Vienna meeting’s shadows,…

In the lobby of a Riyadh hotel, a Danish tourist approached me to ask where I was from. I pretended that I came from a normal country, but later confessed. He asked me about my job and why I was in Riyadh. I told him I am a journalist and was following Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's tour…

Recently, on Twitter, the political scientist Lee Drutman issued a challenge to his followers and readers. “I’m all for envisioning doomsday scenarios so we can better prepare to avoid them,” he wrote. “But I’d also like to read more scenarios about how American democracy improves, and really…

Most of the dire forecasts of the effects of rising carbon emissions and global warming assume no significant human response. Rising sea levels will flood the coastal cities to which people have increasingly moved. Crops will wither due to too much summer heat. Perhaps the dinosaurs died out…

It feels ominously like 2014 again. Back then, Russian troops and tanks rolled into eastern Ukraine while the West, in shock, looked on. This year, Russia has once again raised the tenor of anti-Ukraine propaganda and assembled nearly 100,000 military personnel along Ukraine’s border, plus tanks…

It could have been a scene straight out of an apocalyptic horror movie. When the World Health Organization declared the Omicron variant of the coronavirus a “variant of concern” in late November, borders closed, markets tumbled and warnings spread about how this new threat could ravage the world’s…

If elections are held in Lebanon, a crisis of identity could burst into Lebanese political life, or what is left of it. However, even if those elections are not held, the outcome would likely not be very different. At least three political forces are facing this crisis: the Aounists, Harirists, and…

One of cryptocurrency’s spiritual forebears, Timothy C. May, predicted in the 1990s that untraceable digital cash would allow online casinos, bank secrecy and money laundering to flourish. Although laws would be dodged, he said, the individual anonymity and freedom would be worth it — at least,…