Zuckerberg’s visit to Brussels shows European politicians also have no clue...
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. But we should still be profoundly disturbed: It has now become clear that our elected representatives, the people whom we send to parliaments and congresses to make...
View ArticleTrump’s actions on North Korea have consequences. Here’s a list of them.
It was mocked when it first appeared a few days ago. But now the White House commemorative coin — the one struck to mark the great peace summit between President Trump and “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un...
View ArticleIreland’s abortion referendum reminds us that history is never written in stone
I was in Dublin in May 2015, on the day that Ireland held a referendum on same-sex marriage. The “yes” vote — in favor of allowing gays to marry — won resoundingly. That night, I walked through a...
View ArticleUkraine’s government just faked a journalist’s death. Will it be worth the cost?
KIEV, Ukraine — One of the reasons democracies have responded so ineptly to the flood tide of crass disinformation coming from Russia is that there is no obvious form of counter-strike, no...
View ArticleTrump’s ambassador to Germany is sabotaging the Atlantic alliance
Imagine this scenario: A new Chinese ambassador is sent to Washington. Brash and arrogant, he comes from the extreme Maoist wing of the Chinese communist party. A month after his arrival, he gives an...
View ArticleNATO is once again practicing for the worst
Scruffy, yellowish-brown buildings are bunched around a long courtyard; portable toilets and generators have been set up on the dusty ground beside. Inside, military-grade laptops, the kind that don’t...
View ArticleThis is how Putin buys influence in the West
In the old days, these things were done differently. There were KGB couriers, bags of cash, “Moscow gold,” secret subsidies for far-left printing presses: The Soviet Communist Party was seeking to...
View ArticleIn Trump’s world, morality is for losers
“Virtue-signaling” is a snide little phrase that people vaguely of the “right” invented to tease people vaguely of the “left.” Like “limousine liberal” or “champagne socialist,” it implies insincerity...
View ArticleThe dark history behind Trump’s inflammatory language
It is remarkable, in retrospect, how many and varied were the dictatorships of the past century. Murderous regimes — states that killed large numbers of their own citizens for political reasons — arose...
View ArticleMourning the passing of Jim Denton
The reputation of Washington as a heartless, power-crazed city, a place for the hard-eyed and the coldblooded, is not entirely undeserved. There is a lot at stake in the capital of a superpower: the...
View ArticleGreece offers a glimpse of life after populism
There was a moment, at the height of the Greek debt crisis in July 2015, when many Athenians went to sleep expecting to wake up in a different country. One Greek academic told me he feared Greece would...
View ArticleTrump is hinting at concessions to Putin. So what do we get back?
“We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,” Harry Hopkins told his biographer. “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great...
View ArticleBrexit turned out to be harder than they thought — so the Brexiteers are...
In the United States, a country where Cabinet members now resign with great regularity, the departures of David Davis, the British cabinet minister responsible for Britain leaving the European Union,...
View ArticleEurope needs to start planning for a future with no U.S.
After many weeks of claiming, dishonestly, that European allies “owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back” — in fact, Europeans spend far more money on European defense than does the...
View ArticlePutin’s war is transforming Ukraine
When they first arrived in Lviv, a university rector told me, the students who came from Donetsk walked around in packs, speaking loudly in Russian. They didn’t want to speak Ukrainian, as most...
View ArticleTrump’s U.N. speech was funny. His worldview is even funnier.
Odd juxtapositions, absurd contrasts — these are the stuff of humor. People sometimes laugh, nervously, when someone states something that is both true and unacceptable. People sometimes laugh,...
View ArticleTrump’s new NAFTA is pretty much the same as the old one — but at what cost?
More than once, Donald Trump has called the North American Free Trade Agreement “the worst trade deal ever made.” At other times, he has referred to NAFTA as a “bad joke.” As recently as Sept. 1, he...
View ArticleRussian hackers were caught in the act — and the results are devastating
Dutch authorities have photographs of four Russian military intelligence (GRU) operatives arriving at the Amsterdam airport last April, escorted by a member of the Russian embassy. They have copies of...
View ArticleIt’s official: Americans are living under the rule of a minority
Now that the predictable result has been achieved, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the longer-term impact of the bizarre, emotional events of the past two weeks in Washington. Reasonable...
View ArticleThis is why so many journalists are at risk today
Twelve years ago this month, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist whose reporting came too close to the truth about Russia’s war in Chechnya, was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block....
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