[Mac Margolis] Latin America’s populists are ovewhelmed by COVID-19

Examples abound of how reprehensible leadership has worsened Latin America’s plight during the coronavirus pandemic. After consistently flouting public health safeguards, right-wing populist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his left-wing coeval, Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, turned their countries into COVID-19 killing fields, with a fifth of reported global fatalities between them. Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega went AWOL, failing to show up in public for more tha

Aug. 20, 2020

[David Fickling] China doesn’t need 20,170 km of track

The building of China’s high-speed rail network counts as one of the greatest transportation success stories so far this century. That doesn’t mean the country can repeat the trick. When plans for a nationwide network of trains traveling at up to 350 kilometers per hour were first hatched in 2004, it was thought such projects could only be viable in rich countries. Beijing’s economic planners proved those naysayers wrong. Now, two-thirds of the world’s high-speed rail is

Aug. 20, 2020

[Clara Ferreira Marques] Hong Kong’s closed schools risk a lost generation

Keeping schoolchildren home again this fall will come at a hefty price for families and economies around the world. In Hong Kong, authorities may be underestimating the cost. The government’s decision to start the new academic year online after a resurgence in COVID-19 cases has generated little public discussion. That’s a surprise, given that the poorest will suffer disproportionately from another prolonged shutdown. Caution is appropriate when it comes to a virus, especially in

Aug. 19, 2020

[Kim Seong-kon] Korean ministries in the eyes of foreigners

Sometimes outsiders can see what insiders cannot; that is why foreigners’ perspectives are often illuminating. Recently, foreign commentators have expressed concern and puzzlement about the policies and performances of some of our Korean ministries. First, many have raised a question about the necessity of the Ministry of Unification. We know that the Ministry’s primary task is to prepare for the unification of the Korean Peninsula and deal with matters related to North Korea. In

Aug. 19, 2020

[Clara Ferreira Marques] Russia’s Sputnik vaccine gamble is all about Vladimir Putin

There was no clearer way of signaling how Russia sees its coronavirus vaccine: Moscow named it Sputnik, after the satellite whose launch in 1957 marked the start of the space race and forced the West to confront an unexpected, and terrifying, technology gap. Announcing the world’s first regulatory approval this week, President Vladimir Putin sought to repeat the propaganda masterstroke. Yet the rushed endorsement, after just two months of small-scale human testing, is less an affirmation

Aug. 18, 2020

[Michael R. Strain] Closed schools are a national emergency

Many parents in the US are coming to grips with the reality that their children may not return to their schools until the fall semester of 2021. Schools that aren’t opening this fall seem to be waiting for a coronavirus vaccine, and even the most optimistic scenarios don’t envision one to be approved and widely distributed in time for the start of the spring semester in January 2021. Tragically, the lack of urgency and creative thinking from political leadership at all levels of g

Aug. 14, 2020

[Robert J. Fouser] Is ‘Korean New Deal’ needed?

A month ago, on July 14, President Moon Jae-in gave a speech outlining the “Korean New Deal.” The term takes its name from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sweeping response to the Great Depression in 1933. The Korean New Deal has three main pillars: the Digital New Deal, Green New Deal, and a strengthening the social safety net. The proposals are designed to speed economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and promote sustained economic and social development. Though t

Aug. 14, 2020

[Cass R. Sunstein] Republicans’ dangerous hypocrisy

The system of separation of powers is in real trouble. That’s the main conclusion to draw from President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders, attempting to circumvent Congress with actions that (he said) would provide some economic relief made necessary by the pandemic. A central assumption behind the US Constitution no longer holds. The reason is that when members of Congress are asked to assess aggressive and possibly unlawful actions of a sitting president, they now ask one q

Aug. 13, 2020

[Kim Myong-sik] Socialist approach fails in real estate market

After numerous failures, policymakers of the Moon Jae-in government must by now know that they cannot control apartment prices with tough restrictive measures on property transactions. With their latest package, they just seem to be trying to impress the voters who could help them stay in power. Days of the Moon administration have passed really fast with the last half year spent in the fight against the invisible coronavirus. The rest of its five-year tenure is going to be a difficult time wor

Aug. 13, 2020

[James Stavridis] Scowcroft never hated his enemies

As I was preparing to assume duties as supreme allied commander at NATO a decade ago, the two people I sought out for counsel were both generals: Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. The advice from Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was essentially personal, and it boiled down to: “Don’t start to think you are Charlemagne over there, Stavridis.” Meaning, don’t let your ego get out in front of you, and listen to your mentors and

Aug. 12, 2020

[Kim Seong-kon] Memorable phrases in films

We tend to think that movies are merely a form of entertainment, but this is only partially true. In fact, a film is an excellent cultural text and an important social document. Furthermore, a film is a valuable text through which we can learn about life and the world. It that sense, movies are like audiovisual books that we enjoy watching and reading, through which we become not only well informed and knowledgeable, but also enlightened and refined. Films also drench our souls with mesmerizin

Aug. 12, 2020

[Lee Mun-ki] Citizens bring life to park

Couples taking a walk with their dogs in the neighboring park after work, parents vigorously riding bicycles with their children in the fresh air at a lake park on weekends, neighbors occasionally walking up and down Mount Wonsu Promenade nearby their homes to keep healthy: These are common scenes of daily life found in the Sejong Administrative City (Happy City). Parks and green areas in the city have become indispensable spaces for urban residents. According to the recent social atmosphere re

Aug. 12, 2020

[Shang-Jin Wei] The US may lose in Trump’s TikTok war

Following US President Donald Trump’s vow to block US access to TikTok, the popular short-video app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has been in frantic talks with Microsoft, presumably to sell its subsidiary quickly before the ban goes into effect. Of course, it is possible -- even likely –- that Trump’s real intent is not so much to ban TikTok as to force a fire sale to a US buyer. Trump has said that he wants the buyer to be “very American,” and has even

Aug. 11, 2020

[J. Bradford DeLong] Morgue testing the US economy

US national income and output in the first quarter of 2020 was 1.25 percent below what it had been in the fourth quarter of 2019, but still 9.5 percent above what it would be by the second quarter of this year. Now that US national income has plunged 12 percent below what it was at the start of the year, what should we expect for the third quarter? America could always turn out to be lucky; but betting on that would not be prudent. According to Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson of the Universit

Aug. 11, 2020

[Sarah Halzack] Summer of COVID-19 marks the end of office clothes

Professional attire has been evolving for decades into ever more casual modes. For men, suits gave way to blazers and slacks, then blazers and dark jeans, and then just jeans and a button-up. For women, pantyhose got dumped, skirt suits became a relic, and leggings somehow got reclassified in wardrobe taxonomies as pants. Now, thanks to this weird, extraordinary summer America is having, it’s finally happened: Office clothes are officially dead. Desk jockeys have been toiling from home

Aug. 10, 2020

[Tyler Cowen] Coronavirus moralizing has to stop

In some cases, it is already possible to make moral judgments about the various government responses to COVID-19. Such as: The US squandered months of preparation time in early 2020, and President Donald Trump’s administration used and promoted abysmal risk communication strategies. China should have been more transparent about the virus early on. The Brazilian leadership has behaved especially irresponsibly. Nonetheless, the genre of “coronavirus moralizing” is suspect. All t

Aug. 10, 2020

[Clara Ferreira Marques] Europe’s vulnerable ‘last dictator’

In an era of authoritarian populists, at least one iron-fisted leader is looking more vulnerable than he has in decades. Yes, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko will claim another resounding victory after Sunday’s vote. After all, the country has not had an election recognized as free and fair by Western observers since 1995. Yet a creaking $63 billion economy, a poorly handled pandemic, geopolitical isolation and crowds galvanized by the wife of an imprisoned opponent could make his

Aug. 7, 2020

[Seth G. Jones & Juan C. Zarate] US faces new threats, but we have failed to adapt

It has now been more than five months since a US intelligence assessment included in President Donald Trump’s Daily Brief suggested that Russia was paying bounties to Taliban fighters for attacking US and other foreign forces in Afghanistan. And it has been more than a month since news of the intelligence reports became public. Yet the president and his administration still have not adequately denounced Russian activity or outlined a strategy to counter this type of hybrid warfare. It&r

Aug. 7, 2020

[Digital Simplicity] Lost in translation due to raging dispute over mobile game

Once in a while, a well-made game hits the market, gets mostly positive reviews from gamers and rakes in handsome profits over an extended period. To achieve this daunting goal, it must have two main elements: deeply entertaining gameplay and responsive communication with gamers. Guardian Tales, a mobile game launched by Kakao Games on July 16, met the first condition, but has failed to meet the second, touching off a wave of disputes in the domestic gaming industry. The once-popular mobile

Aug. 6, 2020

[Eli Lake] Biden should give Maduro reason to worry

One of the defining features of the Trump years has been the collapse of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. There is at least one notable exception, however: support for a democratic transition in Venezuela. When Juan Guaido, the leader of Venezuela’s national assembly and the man recognized by the US and more than 60 other nations as the country’s interim president, attended the State of the Union address in Washington this year, he received a standing ovation from Democrats a

Aug. 6, 2020