[Mihir Sharma] Will India really go green?

As soon as Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, eyes turned eastward. Even as the US reneges on its promises, the argument now goes, China and India will show leadership instead; they at least are committed to low-carbon growth.I wouldn’t be so sure, at least where India is concerned. It is true that the Indian government has reiterated its Paris pledges. But Trump’s decision has nevertheless opened a door for India to revise its own very stringent commitments

June 9, 2017

[Other view] China makes bold move with Kenyan railway

Kenyan and Chinese officials on Wednesday inaugurated a 470-kilometer-long railway built and largely financed by the Chinese between Kenya’s and East Africa’s busiest port, Mombasa, and Kenya’s capital and financial and commercial center, Nairobi.The Chinese also recently opened another important railway line between Djibouti, further up the East African coast, a country with America’s only military base in Africa, and another key African country, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is landlocked and, thus, the

June 9, 2017

[Other view] Stand against terrorism, even in Iran

There is only one acceptable response to Wednesday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Iran: swift and unequivocal condemnation of the perpetrators, and condolences to the victims. By joining the other world leaders who have offered their sympathy, US President Donald Trump can reaffirm both America’s standing in the community of nations and its determination to defeat terrorism, whatever and wherever its source.Yes, there is an obvious irony here: The US has rightly condemned Iran’s long history of s

June 8, 2017

[The Baltimore Sun] Trump’s London attack

The firm and defiant yet calm and reasoned response of British leaders to Saturday night’s terrorist attack on London Bridge, which involved three men who steered a rented van into pedestrians and then got out and began stabbing people, was pitch perfect. The response by Donald Trump, on the other hand, has surely set a new low in statesmanship (or perhaps anti-statesmanship) by an American president as he lashed out at London’s mayor, used the death of seven Brits to promote his travel ban and

June 8, 2017

[Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] Cutting off Qatar: Sunni Arab states make a puzzling move

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed the United States on with the Sunni Muslim states of the Persian Gulf in a meeting with their leaders in Saudi Arabia during his recent overseas tour. Monday morning, six of the states in the region broke off relations with Qatar, easily the most progressive of the Arab members of the group.Bahrain, Egypt, one of the governments in Libya, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the faction in the Yemen civil war backed by Saudi Arabia and the US br

June 8, 2017

[Mark Whitehouse] Why more jobs doesn’t mean more growth

How can the US economy keep creating jobs and still grow so slowly? One explanation can be found in the latest employment data: The sectors adding the most workers are among the less productive.The Labor Department’s monthly survey for May suggests that employers were still in a hiring mood. They added an estimated 138,000 jobs -- less than expected but still enough to push down the unemployment rate, which declined slightly to a 16-year low of 4.3 percent (albeit due to a drop in the number of

June 8, 2017

[Tim Luckhurst] A socialist resurgence in the United Kingdom

When Britain’s Conservative Party prime minister, Theresa May, called a snap general election on April 18, surprise was complete. This was precisely what she had promised she would not do. But shock soon dissipated. On all available evidence, the prime minister’s volte-face made sense.Her party was massively ahead in the polls. Opposition Labour Party politicians despised their leader, the 68-year-old socialist hard-liner Jeremy Corbyn, at least as much as they disliked May. The stage appeared s

June 7, 2017

[Steven Conn] Isolationism is another word for ignoring inconvenient truths

It has been almost a century since the United States walked away from an international accord as significant as the Paris agreement on climate. In 1920, the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles despite the desperate attempts by President Woodrow Wilson to rally support for it. Those attempts likely contributed to a massive stroke that left Wilson incapacitated for the rest of his term.The Versailles treaty brought an end to World War I, and historians agree that in many ways it wasn

June 7, 2017

[Robin M. Mills] Qatar still has many friends in energy markets

Oil markets seem impervious to geopolitical risk. As four Arab neighbors imposed an unprecedented embargo on Qatar on Monday, oil prices briefly jumped 1.6 percent before falling back. The fuel to watch, though, is not oil, but gas. If this dispute is not resolved quickly, it may mean a hot summer in the Gulf.The problem has been simmering for a long time, with three of Qatar’s Gulf Cooperation Council colleagues blaming it for backing Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, and being

June 7, 2017

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] Trump’s rogue America

Donald Trump has thrown a hand grenade into the global economic architecture that was so painstakingly constructed in the years after World War II’s end. The attempted destruction of this rules-based system of global governance -- now manifested in Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement -- is just the latest aspect of the US president’s assault on our basic system of values and institutions.The world is only slowly coming fully to terms with the malevolence

June 6, 2017

[Adam Minter] On climate, China should think small

It‘s a common sight in rural China: rows and rows of low-rise apartment buildings, often topped by solar water heaters the size of kitchen tables. By one estimate, 30 million Chinese households rely upon the devices for hot water. They’re served by 3,000 companies that sell around 1 million of the devices annually. Neither subsidies nor environmental guilt account for the sales, or for China’s place as the renewable hot-water capital of the world. Folks in rural areas have been buying them for t

June 6, 2017

[Other view] ‘America first’? Not by alienating allies

President Trump was elected on a pledge to put “America first.” But that doesn’t mean alliances should be secondary. Strong bonds are in the country’s best interests, and straining these ties is counterproductive in an increasingly turbulent world.But that’s what Trump did with his profoundly bad decision to take America out of the Paris climate accord, a move as diplomatically dire as it is environmentally unsound.Allies had urged the president to remain in the pact. His rejection of it, and th

June 6, 2017

[Carl P. Leubsdorf] Russia probe looms over Trump’s international and domestic agenda

As presidential aides H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn briefed reporters on President Donald Trump’s meetings with fellow global leaders, a television screen behind them displayed the latest Washington Post scoop tying Jared Kushner to the probe of possible campaign collusion with Russia.That scene last weekend in Sicily provides an apt portrait of the president’s predicament after a weeklong venture designed to show him as a major player on the international scene. His Middle East initiatives may or

June 6, 2017