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It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition...
It might come as a surprise that the Gulf states have more than a passing interest in events in Belarus. Beyond growing economic ties, the political drama provides valuable lessons for the region’s monarchies and their efforts to maintain standards of living for their citizens without...
China’s footprint in global foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased notably since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. That served to bring Chinese overseas FDI closer to a level that one would expect, based on the country’s weight in the global economy. China...
Many experts argue India is the weaker power unable to take on China. In an article in Foreign Policy, James Crabtree argues that a trade war with China would be a bad idea for India. In his view, India’s “military is inefficient, underequipped, and dogged by procurement corruption...
It is increasingly likely that, unless things change, on January 1, 2021, we will have a no-deal Brexit. That would mean the only deal between the European Union and the United Kingdom would be the already ratified EU withdrawal agreement of 2019. There are only around 50 working days left in...
An article written by Henry M. Paulson Jr. should attract the attention of anyone trying to keep pace with the evolution of a battered global economy in a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment. Paulson is not some lightweight journalist. He served as the United States secretary of the...
On February 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid bare his long-awaited vision of a “global Britain” in a world after Brexit. Speaking amidst the imperial grandeur of Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Johnson’s message was that the United Kingdom, liberated from the...
For decades, the Chinese government has sold to the world the notion that the Chinese economy can defy gravity, maintaining double-digit GDP growth rates year after year in the 1990s and 2000s, and staying above 6% for all of the previous decade, according to official government statistics. The...
“All of you young people who served in the war. You are all a lost generation.” This famous phrase is credited to Gertrude Stein by Ernest Hemingway, who popularized it in the epigraph to his 1926 novel “The Sun also Rises.” The phrase encapsulates the feelings of a generation,...
Not only has UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson failed to learn from other countries’ dealings with COVID-19, he has stubbornly refused to learn from his own experience. He is the true king of fools. It would be laughable were it not for the tens of thousands of deaths he and his government are...
Anthropogenic climate change and the unprecedented shift in the global center of economic gravity from West to East represent two of the most profound macrotrends set to transform the geopolitical landscape in the 21st century. Indeed, as Asia’s emerging powerhouses, notably China, with its...
