[Hussein Ibish] After journalist’s disappearance, US must reset Saudi relations

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and writer for the Washington Post, is the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations in years. While the Trump administration is resistant, unless the emerging narrative about what happened changes, a clear American response will be inevitable and warranted.But we need to be clear about what we want and why we want it, and to accept our own responsibility for the international climate in which this has occurred.Everyone agrees that

Oct. 14, 2018

[Anjani Trivedi] What global slowdown? Japan Inc. is roaring ahead

Japan Inc. is getting its groove back. An overlooked policy change could be a driver.In recent months, Japanese companies have been posting a wave of positive data. Machinery orders -- a key indicator of companies’ capital spending in the future -- rose 12.6 percent on the year in August to the highest level in a decade, data Wednesday showed, much faster than forecast. Several analysts had expected orders to fall.Meanwhile, corporate investment shot up last quarter to the fastest pace in over a

Oct. 11, 2018

[Peter Singer] Choosing the best students

In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Oct. 15, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard’s admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege” because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipula

Oct. 11, 2018

[Eli Lake] Suspend China from Interpol

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary-general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. “Interpol’s General Secretariat looks forward to an official respons

Oct. 10, 2018

[David Ignatius] Jamal Khashoggi chose to tell truth. It’s part of reason he’s beloved.

George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a British newspaper in the mid-1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same insistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at the Washington Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.I have known

Oct. 10, 2018

[Noah Smith] Trump needs plan to win trade war with China

President Donald Trump’s trade war is less bad than it was just a short time ago. After some tense negotiations, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been replaced with a new, very similar arrangement, meaning the disruption to trade -- and to US relations with Canada and Mexico -- will be contained. The agreement might even ease the damage from the president’s misguided steel and aluminum tariffs. Trump has also turned his attention away from Europe, avoiding the mistake of getting into

Oct. 10, 2018

[Matthew F. Ferraro] ‘America First’ will likely fizzle fast

The “America First” policy President Donald Trump extolls “has won,” scholar Robert Kagan wrote in a recent op-ed, surmising that the administration’s preference for unilateralism, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions amount to “a new direction of American foreign policy.”But there is reason to believe victory will be fleeting. In time, this period may be recognized more as the high water mark of a short-lived turn toward quasi-isolationism than the beginning of an enduring trend.To

Oct. 10, 2018

[Hal Brands] China hack shows weakness of Pence’s new hard-line

If you thought the US-China relationship couldn‘t get much worse, consider what happened on Thursday alone. First there was a bombshell report from Bloomberg Businessweek of a major Chinese espionage effort targeting dozens of US corporations and the Pentagon. Then came Vice President Mike Pence’s speech, which offered the sharpest, most comprehensive indictment of Beijing’s behavior by any American leader since the Cold War. Pence labeled the situation with China a “great-power competition.” Wh

Oct. 9, 2018

[Tyler Cowen] Renaming NAFTA just might work

The Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA is decidedly underwhelming, the product of a toxic process that made only a modest modification of the original deal. The administration’s renaming of NAFTA, however -- it will henceforth be known as the USMCA, for the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement -- could prove to be a stroke of political and marketing genius.　Names really matter, and politicians should give as much thought to them as corporations do. Amazon, Google and Apple, for instance, have b

Oct. 9, 2018

[David Cay Johnston] Allegations of years of tax dodges add to an awful truth -- the president as ‘financial vampire’

Americans were confronted Tuesday with a profound problem, one that challenges our commitment to accountable democratic government and justice. It is an awful truth that we must face now that the New York Times has published a richly documented, 14,000-word expose alleging decades of deeply corrupt Trump family finances.After 18 months of interviewing people who worked for or with the Trump family and scrutinizing more than 100,000 documents, the newspaper painted a portrait “unprecedented in sc

Oct. 9, 2018

[Noah Smith] Let immigrants save America’s struggling cities

Immigrants who want to work in the US can be sponsored either by individuals -- usually family members -- or companies. Regional immigration is a proposed variation on this system, in which a region -- probably a city, but perhaps a county or state -- sponsors an immigrant for a green card or work visa. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in policy circles as a way to revive “old industrial cities that have been hollowed out.”I used to be against regional immigration. The reason is that if re

Oct. 9, 2018

[David Ignatius] Trump’s bullying tactics with Iran could backfire

President Donald Trump seems convinced that he has found the formula for success in foreign policy: Bully your adversaries, sanction them, squeeze them -- and then flatter them and make a deal. Trump followed this approach with North Korea and he got a showy summit meeting in Singapore in June with Kim Jong-un and a pledge -- encouraging but so far undelivered -- for denuclearization. He adopted the hard-talk/sweet-talk tactics with Mexico and, eventually, after a long pout, with Canada, and he

Oct. 8, 2018