World News Insights: Opinion Articles

US diplomacy’s recent stream of own goals has been quite impressive. Even apparent victories such as the announcement of a “new, enhanced, trilateral” Australia-UK-US defense partnership, awkwardly abbreviated to AUKUS, have been tarnished by a sense that allies’ interests have been dismissed or…

The final votes are still trickling in, but the verdict is already out. Russia’s ruling party has retained its supermajority in the Duma, ensuring control of the legislature in the years running up to the 2024 presidential election. Whether that’s really the decisive victory the Kremlin wanted…

In his first speech as US president to the United Nations General Assembly, Joe Biden promised the world that this period of “relentless war” was giving way to “a new era of relentless diplomacy.” In this new era, he explained, the US would be working with other nations to lift people out of…

After the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, Chinese leaders reportedly commissioned in-depth studies of its causes. One of the U.S.S.R.’s biggest mistakes, according to Chinese researchers, was to engage in a costly arms race with the US that ultimately bankrupted the Soviet economy. …

There’s a joke on Twitter about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending more than $3 billion on research and development over the last five years was doubling the character count of a tweet. That characterization isn’t exactly fair, but there’s enough…

Is there a difference, in the manner in which they rule, between rulers who previously resisted colonialism and granted their countries independence by force and those who made nice with colonialism until they came to be considered, in the eyes of some, as colonial agents? Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s…

How do you add guardrails into a product that was built for constant interaction? A deluge of documents leaked out of Facebook led to bombshell reports in The Wall Street Journal last week highlighting harms — from unfair treatment of users to human trafficking — that the company partly ignored and…

Arms deals between longtime allies don’t typically make global news, let alone lead the headlines on multiple continents. But the new Aukus (Australia-UK-US) pact isn’t a garden-variety arms deal. It weaves together several compelling global story lines, from the shifting alignments in maritime…

I want to put a text before you, from February 2020, the ideological landscape into which the coronavirus first arrived. It’s a review in The London Review of Books, a fine highbrow left-of-center publication, covering a book about plague and quarantine in 17th-century Italy. The book, by the…

The digital scourge known as ransomware — in which hackers shut down electronic systems until a ransom is paid — is worse than ever. Over the past few months, these attacks have leaked sensitive government data, thwarted the operations of hundreds of businesses and even temporarily shut down one of…

As the world economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia (ME&CA) region faces an existential question. Will the pandemic usher in a new social contract that would help countries to emerge stronger and generate strong, sustainable, and inclusive…

I was delighted by the news that Iranian diesel fuel tankers arrived in Lebanon via Syria. I was even more delighted by the celebrations accompanying the convoys, firing bullets and rockets in the air, and with them slogans, flags and pictures of the senior leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary…