After a disappointing French presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to get closer to what he wants in Italy. After the March election, it is almost certain to get both a pro-Russian government and a sizable pro-Russian opposition. They will likely make sure that the European Union won't expand sanctions against Russia -- but the sanctions are unlikely to be lifted.　The Kremlin’s policy, based largely on economic interest, is to drive a wedge between the US and the EU on

Jan. 24, 2018

Despite media hysteria during the recently deceased government shutdown, the reality is that the United States has had such political paralysis on average every 30 months for nearly a half-century, lasting on average seven days.　Shutdowns, even these partial ones few people notice outside Washington, raise many questions: What exactly gets shut down? When isn’t the government shut down over a weekend? Why are these stalemates never solved for good? Will voters even remember this hiatus come Nove

Jan. 24, 2018

Recently, President Donald Trump allegedly voiced his desire for “more people from places like Norway” to immigrate to the US.That’s just not going to happen.Last year, I advised 24 law students studying the law and culture of Norway. During spring break, we traveled to Tromso and Oslo, Norway, to interview lawyers, nongovernmental organizations and businesspeople about a variety of the country’s legal issues. Based on our visit, here’s why the president is wrongheaded in thinking that hordes of

Jan. 24, 2018

Donald Trump’s tirade a week ago against nonwhite countries may be tearing the final fiber off American soft power.　Witness the worldwide reaction in the time since the president of the United States called African and Latin American countries “s---holes.” This is the latest in a series of offensive actions or assertions by the president that undercuts the appeal of America and American values.　“Trump has been a disaster for American soft power,” said Joseph Nye, the distinguished diplomat and a

Jan. 23, 2018

Both South Korea and North Korea have been striving to be recognized as players on the global stage for many years. North Korea has been doing it by building nuclear weapons and missiles to get the world’s attention with threats. South Korea is currently doing it by welcoming international citizens to PyeongChang for the Olympics. While the North rejects internationalism -- even dictator Kim Jong-un does not travel abroad -- the South has come to see the benefits of embracing it. This embrace be

Jan. 23, 2018

Have the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games turned into the Pyongyang Games? Hardly.But North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has seized the Olympic spotlight, with the agreement that athletes from both sides of the demilitarized zone will march under a unified flag during opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics next month in PyeongChang, South Korea.The International Olympic Committee signed off on the deal Saturday. North Korea will send 22 athletes, including a group of women’s hockey players who w

Jan. 23, 2018

In training exercises in a mock Afghan village constructed here on a base amid swampland, the US Army is applying the military lesson of the war against the Islamic State group: Help your partners beat the enemy, but don’t try to do the fighting yourself.　Letting others fight the battle hasn’t been the American way in modern times, to our immense national frustration. The US military became bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, much as it had a generation earlier in Vietnam, by trying to reshape

Jan. 22, 2018

In P.D. James’ dystopian novel “The Children of Men,” the unthinkable has happened -- people have stopped having children.　Science cannot pinpoint the reason why human reproduction is no longer possible, and it’s at a loss how to fix it. Without hope for the future, society descends into moral darkness.　The elderly, now a burden, are involuntarily euthanized. “Criminals” are exported to an island prison from which none return. Roving bands of hedonic young men terrorize and murder.　The governmen

Jan. 22, 2018

Rent control is one of the first policies that students traditionally learn about in undergraduate economics classes. The idea is to get young people thinking about how policies intended to help the poor can backfire and hurt them instead. According to the basic theory of supply and demand, rent control causes housing shortages that reduce the number of low-income people who can live in a city. Even worse, rent control will tend to raise demand for housing -- and therefore, rents -- in other are

Jan. 22, 2018

Questions about Donald Trump’s mental fitness to serve as president keep mounting. A historically unprecedented number of mental health professionals have mobilized to express concern about the dangers of the mental instability we see in Trump, coupled with the power of the presidency. Through the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts, we called for a full neuropsychiatric examination and a capacity to serve evaluation.　When Trump presented for his annual physical exam last week,

Jan. 22, 2018

Last Sunday’s sinking of an Iranian oil tanker 180 miles off the coast of Shanghai certainly looks like an environmental disaster. Depending on how many of the ship’s 1 million barrels of condensate were released into the ocean and not burned off, the accident could end up being one of the biggest oil spills in half a century. The irony? Even that wouldn’t represent the biggest disaster to befall the area.　The fact is, thanks to massive overfishing in China’s territorial waters, there isn’t much

Jan. 21, 2018

The many critics of Freedom House can finally gloat: The think tank has turned its well-calibrated guns on the US in its 2018 report on “Freedom in the World”:　“The past year brought further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory, damaging its international credibility as a champion of good governance and human rights.”　America’s “core institutions,” the think tank continues, “were attacked by an administration that rejects established norms of eth

Jan. 21, 2018

The Global Partnership for Education, a worthy and capable initiative to promote education in 65 low-income countries, is having what the jargon of development assistance calls a “replenishment round,” meaning that it is asking donor governments to refill its coffers. Yet the fact that the GPE is begging for mere crumbs -- a mere $1 billion per year -- exposes the charade of Western governments’ commitment to the global Education for All agenda.The United States and the European Union have never

Jan. 21, 2018

Can an international deal ever really be final? President Donald Trump seems to think the answer is no, given his penchant for withdrawing from agreements made under President Barack Obama -- the Paris climate change accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership on trade and (maybe) the Iranian nuclear deal.　But what about international agreements that actually declare themselves to be irreversible? That’s the case with the 2015 Japan-South Korea deal that was aimed at ending once and for all the confl

Jan. 19, 2018