World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Through its recent legal threat against Coinbase’s new interest-bearing cryptocurrency account program, the Securities and Exchange Commission has created a stir in both finance and tech — two worlds that have always been intertwined, but because of the implications of digital technology itself,…

Somehow, one may say that few regional and international powers did not “contribute” to the formation of the new Lebanese cabinet. However, this cabinet is nothing more than a “crisis management team”. Its task is to deal with a problem whose solution would be an inseparable part of the much larger…

Vladimir Putin has a right to be relieved. Every crack in the US-led alliance delights him. This time, he is overjoyed because he is not in the eye of the storm. The crisis clearly expresses America’s preoccupation with the Chinese challenge. True, it is not the first time that public disputes…

Many Lebanese have noticed that the steep decline in the quality of ministers. Every new government is more mediocre than that which preceded it. Every new government has a greater number of ministers suffering from extreme drabness. That is what most people from all walks of life say to each…

Climate change is having a breakout performance this year. Throughout the US, the slow-motion calamity long described in scientific studies and news articles has been visible to the naked eye or felt on tingling flesh — here too wet, there too dry, everywhere too hot. It’s only human to wonder…

There have been many dark moments in the two decades since 9/11, some of them in Kabul last month. I remain especially haunted by a snapshot from 2007 Iraq. British political adviser Emma Sky was riding a Blackhawk with US commander Gen. Raymond Odierno. She mentioned to her boss over the intercom…

The American economy has come a long way. It was only 18 months ago when the coronavirus pandemic struck in full force, igniting a devastating recession. But as the recent wave of infections and hospitalizations from the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus makes clear, the pandemic is not…

Was it worth it? I don’t mean the wars — it’s nearly impossible to argue the wars were worth it, surely — but what about our service in them? Did it mean anything? This question haunts many veterans on the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Did anything we do in the years that followed…

It is not easy to forget that terrible day, and even after 20 years it is still disturbing and frightening that it can happen again anywhere in the world, and dreadfully replicable. Two decades later, the number of al-Qaeda fighters has increased, their areas of deployment have expanded,…

A civilization “is born stoic and dies epicurean,” wrote historian Will Durant about the Babylonians. Our civilization was born optimistic and enlightened, at least by the standards of the day. Now it feels as if it’s fading into paranoid senility. Joe Biden was supposed to be the man of the…

I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on…

Never mind the howls of outrage from Paris or the indignation of Beijing. Australia’s scuttling of a $65 billion French submarine contract in favor of yet stronger ties with the US and UK is significant but hardly earth-shattering. The true import of the contretemps is that it underscores long…