[Therese Raphael] Wenger wasn’t just a soccer coach

The leader of what was once considered one of the best-managed soccer clubs in the world stepped down Friday and the Twittersphere erupted in two opposite directions: jubilation and sadness.　Half of English football fans seem to regard the departure from the Arsenal Football Club of 68-year-old Arsene Wenger as coming years too late. The other half rues the brutality of a changing industry that turned his virtues into handicaps. Wenger was enormously successful and his club was nicely profitable

April 24, 2018

[The Nation] What happened to America ‘for the people’?

Police around the world are supposedly there “to serve and protect,” and yet we see the current showdown between a former chief of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and President Donald Trump sinking America’s already shaky democracy further into jeopardy. Elected leaders are of course mandated to assemble their own teams of specialists on agriculture, finance, public welfare and the like, but the police represent a different kind of institution, assigned a singular task, and that is ensuri

April 23, 2018

[Bloomberg] Cuba after the Castros

When Cuba’s President Raul Castro hands over power, the change will be more symbolic than substantive. The 86-year-old Castro will remain party leader until 2021 -- and his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, wasn’t chosen for his determination to dismantle Cuba’s police state or abandon its socialist economic system. Nonetheless, the end of the Castros’ era is an opportunity for change, and Diaz-Canel has every reason to try to seize it.Cuba’s economy is in a truly dismal state. After year

April 23, 2018

[Bandy X. Lee] Peace or war on Korean Peninsula?

One of the most critical roles of a president is to negotiate terms of peace and war. The fate of a nation, or even the world, could hang in the balance; a misstep could plunge humanity into a worldwide war, but the right step could bring about long-awaited peace. A sudden and intense interest in the American president since his agreement to a US-North Korea summit took me to South Korea as editor of the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” More than two dozen top mental health professiona

April 23, 2018

[Eli Lake] Trump is not Nixon and North Korea is not China

If you Google “Trump,” “Nixon” and “China,” you will find billions of pixels devoted to comparing the 37th president’s breakthrough with Beijing to the potential summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.　 The parallel is understandable. It took a committed anti-communist to open relations with Communist China. Perhaps it will take a president who threatened “fire and fury” to open ties to the leader he called “little rocket man.” In 1972 when Mao Zedong hosted President Richard Nixon in Beiji

April 22, 2018

[Hal Brands] New threat to the US: the axis of autocracy

It sounded like an echo of Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s and 1960s when China’s new defense minister, Wei Fenghe, said at a meeting in Moscow this month, “The Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.”　 A full-blown military alliance remains a long ways off, of course, and it is easy to dismiss Wei’s remarks as rhetorical posturing. But that would be a mistake, because Wei nonetheless captured an ominous feature of world politics tod

April 22, 2018

[Trudy Rubin] After missile strike, will Trump or Putin be seen as the winner?

The weather was gloriously sunny here in Moscow on Monday and Tuesday, as if to celebrate the release of tension over the possibility that Saturday’s US missile strike in Syria would lead to US-Russia fighting. Perhaps the most significant lesson of the strike is that the military de-confliction channels between Washington and Moscow still work.　Oblivious to recent tensions, crowds of tourists wandered around the Kremlin walls and St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square and the nearby mall inside th

April 22, 2018

[Markos Kounalakis] First Lady Barbara Bush made a difference. Can Melania?

First ladies since Eleanor Roosevelt have developed over the years to do more than serve merely as White House hostess-in-chief. Barbara Bush took on an issue, applied her passion, and tried to move the needle on literacy. It’s now time to deploy Melania Trump where she can potentially make a difference. It’s time for her to visit her Central European home region to try and bring those countries back to the American fold.　Foreign-born and bred, Melania is the first modern first lady who cannot a

April 20, 2018

[Trudy Rubin] Russian TV news exacerbates disconnect between Putin and the US

As I was preparing to leave for Moscow, Russian friends were telling me that the TV talk shows -- in expectation of a US missile strike on Syria -- were hyping the advent of World War III.　 President Donald Trump had warned Russia that the “missiles were coming.” But by the time I arrived late Sunday, the mood had totally shifted. Neither TV news, nor Russians I spoke with, were talking about war.　US military officials had given prior warnings to Russian counterparts: the strikes on three Syrian

April 19, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Why Germany didn’t join the Syria strikes

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has mockingly remarked that the German government’s decision to back the US, British and French strikes in Syria with rhetoric but not with missiles “has shown once again that it’s a grandmaster of dialectics.” US President Donald Trump may snort in agreement. But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Hegelian approach to geopolitics makes more sense than her Western allies’ willingness to rattle their weapons.　Merkel’s statement on Saturday morning

April 19, 2018

[Jessica Fanzo] The whole world needs to eat better

The food that people eat has become a major risk factor for disability and death worldwide. Yet countries and their philanthropic supporters seem not to be paying attention. They‘re investing far too little in improving diets and preventing nutrition-related disease.　The problem is part of a larger trend in human mortality. Until recently, in many low- and middle-income countries, malaria, diarrhea and other infectious diseases were the biggest killers. While such illnesses are far from being er

April 19, 2018

[Heidi Stevens] Some white people don’t think black lives matter

On Saturday I drove with my family to Peoria, Illinois, for an athletic competition. We stopped at a gas station off Interstate 55 to use the restroom. The station sold fishing tackle and snacks. It also sold bumper stickers.　One of them said “Black Trucks Matter.”　Two days earlier, on Thursday, a 14-year-old African-American boy, Brennan Walker, overslept and missed his school bus. He started walking to school, trying to re-create his bus route, but he got lost.　He approached a house in a subdi

April 18, 2018