Who Lost Iraq?
This week, as Baghdad is under siege from within and Kobani is poised to fall to ISIS fighters, the question of "Who Lost Iraq?" is taking center stage. Many, including some former insiders, are quick...
View ArticleMerkel in the Middle as Post-Cold War Europe Falters
The whole idea of European integration was to anchor Germany in Europe to avoid another world war and to spread prosperity across the continent with a single market and common currency. Russia agreed...
View ArticlePutin Uses 21st Century Strategy to Restore Old Czarist Realm
As a fragile cease-fire takes hold in Ukraine after nearly five months of carnage, Vladimir Putin's long-term strategy has become clear. This week in The WorldPost Robert Coalson, writing from Prague,...
View ArticleConfucius vs. The Umbrella Revolution
In the streets of Hong Kong today, China's future is meeting its past. It's 17 year-old rebellious student Joshua Wong, who is leading the Umbrella Revolution protests, versus Confucius, the sage of...
View ArticleScotland Stays Stitched
This week, the world reeled from a welter of cross currents. Though the "yes" vote on independence lost in the end, the Scottish referendum revealed a passionately dis-United Kingdom. Elsewhere,...
View Article25 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Is the World Dividing into Blocs...
The world is at a tipping point. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing rise of China and other emerging economies, fragile institutions -- the Asia Pacific Economic...
View ArticleWhere Pope Francis and Xi Jinping Cross Paths
Pope Francis and President Xi Jinping were both in Washington and New York this week for engagements at the White House and the United Nations. They didn't meet. But their paths certainly crossed. The...
View ArticleISIS Has Unified the World; Climate Change Has Divided It
This week, the U.N. Security Council stood united in a unanimous resolution to fight what President Obama called the ISIS "network of death." Yet, despite pleas for the world to act together on global...
View ArticleVictory in Myanmar for Democracy -- On a Leash
Pent-up democratic aspirations were unleashed this week in Myanmar's first free election in decades, resulting in a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi and her opposition party. But as Mark Farmaner...
View ArticleObama's Quandary
Obama's quandary in his war on the Islamic State group is that he is fighting the effects of decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East. As Rami Khouri writes in The WorldPost this week from Beirut,...
View Article70 Years After Its Defeat, the Land of the Rising Sun Meets China's Falling...
The future and the past are never far apart in modern Asia, where both the Middle Kingdom and the Land of the Rising Sun are, as never before, great powers at the same time. This week, on the 70th...
View ArticleTurkey's 'Two Souls' Are Being Torn Apart
The characters in Orhan Pamuk's novels are complex, hybrid identities. They are neither purely Islamic traditionalists nor secular fundamentalists, but, as Turkey's most celebrated writer and Nobel...
View Article'The Wretched of the Earth' Are on the Move as Migrants
"The wretched of the earth," in Frantz Fanon's famous phrase, are on the move as migrants. Mostly, they have headed north across scorching deserts and menacing seas to follow their dreams of escaping...
View ArticleChina's Equity Bubble and Greece's Debt Hole Rattle the World
The world was rattled this week by the busted stock market bubble in China and by the "no" vote in Greece last Sunday against austerity policies aimed at reducing the country's unpayable debt. Yet, by...
View ArticleAmerica's Top Strategic Priority Should Be 'Reopening' to China
Writing from Vladivostok, Artyom Lukin sketches a scenario for The WorldPost of where we might end up 20 years from now -- World War III-lite -- if we continue on the present track. As often in...
View ArticleIs the West Abandoning Globalization?
As China establishes a new infrastructure investment bank for Asia and builds out the new Silk Road trading route westward to Turkey, the U.S. Congress is balking at trade agreements and retreating...
View ArticlePreparing to Be Disrupted
This week, The WorldPost conference on "The Future of Work" took place at Lancaster House in London. Discussion around the theme "prepare to be disrupted" ranged from how the emergent sharing economy,...
View ArticleHow Will Greece Take Its Hemlock?
Ancient Greece was not only the birthplace of democracy, but also a deathbed of reason when a jury of 500 citizens condemned Socrates to die by hemlock poisoning for his impious attitude toward the...
View ArticleChina Bares Its Teeth
China's reformist leader Deng Xiaoping famously counseled that his nation should "hide its strength and bide its time" as it grew to the top ranks of the global economy. President Xi Jinping has taken...
View ArticleThe Inconvenient Truth About the Xi-Obama Deal -- It Takes a Strong State to...
It takes a strong state, not (to paraphrase Hillary Clinton) a democratic village, to aggressively fight climate change. This is the inconvenient message emerging in the wake of the Xi-Obama deal on...
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