In case no one has noticed, the world’s geopolitical order in 2022 is not only under severe stress, it has actually begun shaking beneath our feet with an acceleration in the past week. The ongoing Mariupol drama is reaching its final gruesome act, which will likely change everyone’s (meaning...
The idea that governments are the instrument of the people rather than an established ruling class became universally accepted as a feature of "evolved civilization" at some point in the 20th century. It is applied even in many traditional monarchies, such as the United Kingdom and Spain, though...
In the first article of this three-part series, I have made the case that the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan would radicalize Pakistan and increase its global nuclear threat. In the second article, I have argued that the changed circumstances in Afghanistan heightened the threat to Kashmir....
On Sunday, April 24, the French will vote for their president. And the choice for the second and final round of the presidential elections is straightforward: vote for our Republic or against it. This is the third time that a representative of the far-right party led by the Le Pen clan has...
In Sunday’s first round presidential race, even though the ultimate result is to set up a repeat of the 2017 runoff between the incumbent Emmanuel Macron and the xenophobic candidate Marine Le Pen, there were two enormous surprises. The first was the utter humiliation of the two political...
War has returned to the European continent. President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is more than a Russian war on one nation. It is a war on the West and everything the West represents — its democracy, rule of law, liberty and the rules-based international world order it has...
“Democracy” is the currency of hypocrisy in today’s America. No politician or pundit seems able to get enough of it. Most of the babble is about “our precious democracy” and the threats to its institutional survival. But amid all the talk, there is so little critical analysis of that...
Perhaps the most critical immediate question facing the world in 2022 is whether the decline and eventual destruction of democracy are inevitable in the next decade. Thousands of words have been directed to this question over recent years, intensifying after the ascendency of Donald Trump to the...
In a recent article on Fair Observer titled, “Making Sense of Vladimir Putin’s Long Game,” Atul Singh and Glenn Carle make the case that Russia’s president has an overarching plan to bring back the tsarist empire. They contend that Putin has thought deeply about strategy and tactics...
Arizona’s Maricopa County is ground zero in the continuing debate over election integrity in the United States. The so-called audit of the 2.1 million votes cast in that county in last year’s presidential election — by the almost comically inept firm Cyber Ninjas — was supposed to arrive...
Middle East Monitor features an article by American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, who celebrates Tunisia’s progress as a democracy. The author cites recent data produced by two independent agencies that monitor the state of democracy in the world. He makes a point of comparing the North...
Amid all the gloom and doom over the slow retreat of democracy, the past few weeks have come as a welcome relief for proponents of the liberal world order. Since the late 2000s, the election of right-wing, xenophobic and authoritarian leaders and the consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin in...
In an article on Fair Observer describing the quandary India faces as its economy seeks to react to the global trend toward electric vehicles, Atul Singh and Manu Sharma make the strategic observation that investing in battery technology should be a key to India’s economic future. Because of...
Democracy is in crisis across the globe. The problem of understanding what “the people” want or whose authority they will accept has become a dilemma for both the new democracies with their fragile economies that emerged in the period of European decolonization following World War II and the...
Democracy faces a global crisis. And this crisis couldn’t be coming at a worse time. If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump — or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Matteo Salvini in Italy — you probably think that democracy has never been in better health. Recent elections in these countries...
