World Affairs
Time for Less Long-Term Thinking About China
Today, an old friend and former colleague of mine, the Canadian diplomat and political analyst Michael Kovrig, will mark a horrifying milestone: 1,000 days in detention in a Beijing jail, held as a human bargaining chip. With the conviction last month on spurious espionage charges of another Canadian detained
America the Indispensable
God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. ~Otto von Bismarck Post-millennium America does not look good at a glance. The country has struggled with the pandemic and with deepening divisions over race, class, inequality, and culture. It is in the humiliating process of
20 Hungarian Lessons the West Is Still Missing
I lived in Budapest from 1999 to 2014, and for 10 of those years I ran a nonpartisan daily news service focused on Hungarian politics. For me, and for the small number of foreign journalists and analysts based in Hungary in the years before Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 2010
Why Violence and Looting Have Exploded Across South Africa
The explosion of looting and destruction which has overtaken South Africa has left the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa shaken and dazed, its credibility and legitimacy undermined. Ramaphosa’s broadcasts to the nation, appealing for calm, full of cliches and generalities, have met with derision. Nobody doubts that South Africa
The Language of Totalitarian Dehumanization
A week before the massive protests erupted in Cuba, I was celebrating Fourth of July at a friend’s house in Oakland, California, and listening to her tell me stories about her adventures there. She is a Jewish red diaper baby and today seems to identify as some sort of
The 'Lab Leak' Inquiry at the State Department
The following essay was originally posted at the author’s Medium blog here. In both journalism and policymaking—if not always in politics, or in the sordid world of score-settling by unemployed, second-rate apparatchiks—facts matter, and intellectual integrity matters. In light of the remarkable quantity of errant nonsense
Winners and Losers: The Global Economy After COVID
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the world economy in ways that will be debated by pundits and future historians for decades to come. Yet, as hard as it is to predict a disrupted future accurately, the pandemic (not to mention its probable successors) looks likely to produce clear economic winners
How Strong Was Taiwan’s COVID Response?
In September 2020, I arrived in Taiwan on a flight from New York. I had read much about the border protocols that had prevented COVID from entering the country, but many aspects of the arrival process appeared incongruent with the country’s supposedly impermeable defenses. Staff in the airport interacted
