[Joshua J. Whitfield] Missiles and tweets can make us feel better

The suffocating suffering of children is difficult to watch, the young yellow pallor of quivering chemical death. Still and other-worldly, their paralyzed expressions of death are a judgment upon our plain stupidity.　As the better of our kind ministered futile mercy in their last moments, those small children died brutally and slowly, on our phones and televisions in between our pornography and sitcoms. Dead and bitter sacraments of a simple bitter question. Why?　It’s that we saw them die that m

April 13, 2017

[Andrew Sheng] Asia’s search for cultural-intellectual rejuvenation

Last month, Professor Michael Heng argued in Singapore that in order to achieve the Asian Century, there is a need for Asian cultural-intellectual rejuvenation.　Heng’s lecture was in the tradition of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Dean Kishore Mahbubani’s 1998 challenge -‘Can Asians think?’　This search for intellectual rejuvenation is made more urgent by the rise of Trumpism, which has overturned the American neo-liberal world order to spread free markets, democracy and technology to the r

April 13, 2017

[Other view] ‘Killing Fields’ harvest of injustice: 1.7 million killed, 3 convictions

A visit to the memorial at Choeung Ek, a mass grave in Phnom Penh, offers a glimpse into the magnitude of Pol Pot’s butchery. Thousands of skulls stacked atop each other on shelves that reach skyward -- a pillar of death that gives scale to the depravity of the Khmer Rouge.From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime killed 1.7 million Cambodians, one of the worst mass murders the world has ever seen. Pol Pot died in 1998. But many others -- the despot’s inner circle, his commanders, the overseers

April 13, 2017

[Harold Clarke] Brexit negotiations likely to be contentious

Nine months after the historic Brexit referendum, the UK formally notified EU Council President Donald Tusk last week that it would leave the European Union. The results of the forthcoming divorce proceedings are difficult to forecast, but many commentators fear things will go badly.　Why did the UK electorate take what seems to be such a risky course of action by voting for Brexit? Public opinion surveys my colleagues and I have conducted over the past decade with about 150,000 British voters he

April 12, 2017

[Shashi Tharoor] Dalai Lama factor in Sino-Indian relations

Relations between India and China haven’t been particularly warm in recent months. But they have lately taken on an icy chill, with Chinese leaders furious over the Dalai Lama’s visit to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its own. On Saturday, over loud protests from China’s government, the Dalai Lama addressed devotees from far and wide at the historic monastery in the border town of Tawang, where the sixth Dalai Lama was born more than three centuries ago

April 12, 2017

Congress should fight Trump's immigration mess

US President Donald Trump is not about to take control of his vociferously delivered and wildly resonant campaign promise to relentlessly pursue violent illegal immigrants. And that borders on tragic.　He now is presiding over a messy, inconsistent follow-through that has snagged undocumented immigrants caught, say, driving without a license; made others afraid to report to the police violent assaults and other crimes against them; left children without a parent; and even detained for deportation

April 12, 2017

[Tyler Cowen] One fact constraining globalization: It’s a big planet

As the Trump administration continues to evolve, one lesson is that globalized economic trade relations are probably more stable than they might have appeared at first. Most of the talk of trade wars is dwindling, the proposed renegotiation of North American Free Trade Agreement seems to be minor and the Mexican peso and stock market have bounced back since Donald Trump’s election.Yet none of those developments should come as major surprises. Globalization probably won’t contract much because gl

April 11, 2017

[James Kirchick] Germans need to get over their reluctance to lead

If this were any other year, the upcoming federal election in Germany would be like every other German election: humdrum and focused almost exclusively on domestic issues. Despite their country’s size and economic power, Germans resist seeing their nation -- or their chancellor -- as a potential world leader. More than seven decades after World War II, Germany is still uncomfortable with anything implying leadership, which makes some sense when you consider the German word for it: “fuhrung.”　Ove

April 11, 2017

[Mihir Sharma] India loses faith in trade

Until fairly recently, it looked like two massive new agreements would compete to define the future of world trade. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, backed by the US, would try to move the global trade architecture toward new norms, with harmonized regulations at its center. Meanwhile, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, backed by China, would drastically reduce remaining tariffs across a swathe of Asia and push the existing model of trade and manufacturing as far as it could go.　The

April 11, 2017

[Other view] Let Europe compete for London's business

The race is on. As Britain and the European Union begin to negotiate the terms of Brexit, Europe’s financial centers are jostling to lure banks, insurers and asset managers away from the City of London.When providers of goods and services compete for business it‘s almost always good for their customers, and this new post-Brexit rivalry needn’t be any exception. The EU should guard against a disorderly race to the bottom on corporate taxes and financial regulation -- but on the whole, there‘s muc

April 11, 2017

[Other view] Civilian casualties in Iraq, Syria do require urgent review

Protection of the innocent in war time is a marker of civilization itself — a concept so central to international law and the ancient “just war ethic” our laws and norms grew out of that it has been recognized across the millennia.So we can hardly be complacent about the unacceptable number of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes under President Barack Obama.Or about evidence that a growing number of noncombatants have been killed in even more aggressive airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since

April 10, 2017

[Joseph Stiglitz] Illiberal stagnation

Today, a quarter-century after the Cold War’s end, the West and Russia are again at odds. This time, though, at least on one side, the dispute is more transparently about geopolitical power, not ideology. The West has supported in a variety of ways democratic movements in the post-Soviet region, hardly hiding its enthusiasm for the various “color” revolutions that have replaced long-standing dictators with more responsive leaders -- though not all have turned out to be the committed democrats th

April 10, 2017

[James Kirchick] Germans need to get over their reluctance to lead

If this were any other year, the upcoming federal election in Germany would be like every other German election: humdrum and focused almost exclusively on domestic issues. Despite their country’s size and economic power, Germans resist seeing their nation -- or their chancellor -- as a potential world leader. More than seven decades after World War II, Germany is still uncomfortable with anything implying leadership, which makes some sense when you consider the German word for it: “fuhrung.”　Ove

April 10, 2017