[Lionel Laurent] Emmanuel Macron is happy to fight with Italy

Emmanuel Macron has followed the old adage: Never waste a good crisis.　As relations with Italy go from bad to toxic, the French president has taken the unprecedented step of recalling his ambassador from Italy -- the kind of diplomatic spat that doesn’t usually happen between big EU member states. It’s calculated to embarrass Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, who brazenly met with the yellow vest protesters on French soil.　But i

Feb. 10, 2019

[Ann McFeatters] Our role model in the White House

All over America, teens have a new role model. Become president and you only have to work an hour or two a day. The rest is “Executive Time.”　You can play golf nearly 50 percent of the time. You can watch your favorite shows, tweet to your heart’s content, insult opponents at will.　You don’t even have to get up early to walk down the hall to the office.　You don’t have to read briefing papers -- someone will sum them up for you. If the briefers are boring, you can dismiss them until next week, ne

Feb. 10, 2019

[David Ignatius] Stumbling way to Middle East retreat

Iraqi President Barham Salih measured his words in a telephone interview from Baghdad on Monday. He didn’t want to worsen a quarrel with President Trump over US access to an air base in western Iraq. But Iraqi politics is fragile, and ill-considered statements by American presidents can have big consequences. “I appreciate what the US has done to help Iraq,” Salih told me. “We honor that sacrifice. But this success in Iraq is precarious and should not be unduly burdened. It could easily unravel.

Feb. 7, 2019

[Eli Lake] Just say no to negotiations with strongman Maduro

As the crisis in Venezuela enters its third week, many well-intentioned observers are seeking a middle way. To prevent civil war, they say, the opposition and dictator should compromise.　Mexico and Uruguay have offered to mediate the conflict between strongman Nicolas Maduro and Juan Guaido, whom most of the Western Hemisphere regards as Venezuela’s president. Greece has also said it supports negotiations. Two well-respected economists identified as “experts in Latin America” are recommending an

Feb. 7, 2019

[Arvind Subramanian & Josh Felman] Braching for the coming China shock

In September 2018, we argued that China’s economic and foreign policies were defying the “laws” of economics and geopolitics, and warned that the situation could not last. Since then, our assessment has been borne out, and our concerns have deepened.Until recently, China had been able to pursue a unique development path, owing to the government’s far-reaching control over the economy (and society more generally). But those days are over. The country’s internal debts are mounting to unsustainable

Feb. 7, 2019

[Noah Smith] Wealth tax better than most alternatives

Close on the heels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to tax top income at 70 percent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has released her own big idea -- a tax of 2 percent a year on all wealth above $50 million, rising to 3 percent for those fortunes of more than $1 billion. The proposal, which would affect about 75,000 of the country’s wealthiest people, also comes with a set of measures designed to reduce avoidance and evasion.　The motivation for taxing wealth directly undoubtedly come

Feb. 6, 2019

[Trudy Rubin] Intel chiefs reveal Trump’s slipping grip on keeping America safe

After slamming his intelligence chiefs as “passive and naive” and telling them to “go back to school,” US President Donald Trump tried to paper over his Twitter tantrum Wednesday.　Facing sharp criticism for such a public attack -- unprecedented for a US president -- Trump now claims “the media” distorted the testimony of top US intelligence chiefs before the Senate Intelligence Committee -- where they sharply diverged from Trump on the ranking and nature of the most urgent security threats.　Ther

Feb. 6, 2019

[Ramesh Ponnuru] Trump Supreme Court contingency plan

Every White House in the modern era has sought to be prepared in case a vacancy arises on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump’s legal advisers don’t know much more than anyone else about the likelihood of a vacancy this year, but they are making contingency plans. Those plans center on the possibility that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 85 the oldest justice, will leave the court.At the moment, there appear to be seven leading contenders, who can be loosely grouped into a first and second tier ba

Feb. 6, 2019

[Carl P. Leubsdorf] Some early questions to ask about 2020

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. Sen. Kamala Harris. Every day, it seems, another candidate enters the Democratic race. Every week, there’s a new poll, most showing former Vice President Joe Biden as the party’s early presidential leader.The highly respected Cook Political Report even put out its first estimate of the 2020 Electoral College map, showing the Democrats with 232, the Republicans with 220 and the remaining 86 as

Jan. 31, 2019

[Leonid Bershidsky] Want less graft? Allow more freedom.

Transparency International, the Berlin-based global authority on graft, accompanied its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 with a warning that corruption gains where authoritarian and populist leaders erode democratic institutions. A comparison of Transparency’s data with studies by Freedom House, which scores countries on the state of democracy and liberty, reveals a more complex story but leads to the same conclusion.Putting the two organizations’ country scores side by side shows that the

Jan. 31, 2019

[Elizabeth Drew] Nancy Pelosi’s Great Wall of Resistance

Whoever explained to then-President-elect Donald Trump what it meant to be president -- if anyone did -- neglected to tell him that on occasion a president loses a policy fight. That person also forgot to explain to the US president-in-waiting that making a big promise he might be unable to keep required him to figure out how to prevent his most ardent followers from turning against him when he failed to fulfill it.Sloppy job preparation, together with Trump’s distorted personality, led to the n

Jan. 31, 2019

[Therese Raphael Theresa may postpones her moment of Brexit reckoning

If Britain‘s Parliament were the final arbiter of Brexit, Tuesday night’s vote would have been historic. It would have been a crowning achievement for Prime Minister Theresa May: Leavers and Remainers, Conservatives and Labour Party members debated for six hours and voted seven times before a majority finally said what they want to happen.It wasn‘t any of that. The European Union has already said “no” -- in more languages and ways than is reasonable to count -- to the one demand the majority vot

Jan. 31, 2019

[Joe Nocera] Howard Schultz’s presidential campaign is naive

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about Howard Schultz that was, well, not very nice. Schultz had earlier stepped aside as the chief executive of Starbucks Corp., but with the company in a deep slump, he decided to retake control, and reinstalled himself as CEO. My column, written as a snarky open letter, suggested that his comeback would fail.Schultz responded in an unusual way: The next time he was in New York, he invited me to breakfast. He made no effort to tell me why my column was wrong. Ins

Jan. 30, 2019