The disappearance and likely death of Jamal Khashoggi is a clarifying moment.If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia proves to be complicit, this moment will reveal much about the nature of the Saudi leadership. It also tells us something about US-Saudi relations and how vulnerable a partnership not based on shared values can be.It is a clarifying moment for the US to see just how much freedom from the Middle East American oil production has secured. This crisis over the disappearance of the journal

Viewpoints Oct. 22, 2018

Beyond the name change, President Donald Trump’s new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement isn’t that different from the North American Free Trade Agreement that it replaced. But hidden in the bowels of the new trade deal is a clause, Article 32.10, that could have a far-reaching impact. The new agreement requires member states to get approval from the other members if they initiate trade negotiations with a so-called non-market economy. In practice, “non-market” almost certainly means China. If, for examp

Viewpoints Oct. 22, 2018

Peruvians have never been easy on their leaders. For the land that elected Alberto Fujimori and then watched him dismantle democracy, assail human rights and flee the country before returning in irons, maybe that’s for the best.So when a low-profile vice president (Peru’s government has two) who doubled as ambassador to Canada was thrust into the top job in March, following President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s resignation via the sprawling Odebrecht graft scandal, Peruvians weren’t holding their br

Viewpoints Oct. 21, 2018

Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing.Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is

Viewpoints Oct. 21, 2018

In theory, taking a DNA test to reveal your ancestry is optional. But it’s on its way to becoming obligatory. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, announced Monday that she had submitted her DNA to ascertain that she does in fact have Native American ancestry -- after President Donald Trump had taunted her by saying he would throw a testing kit at her. For those of us not in national politics, a study in the journal Science last week claimed that within a few years, it will be possible to ide

Viewpoints Oct. 18, 2018

The world’s business leaders have suddenly been stricken with a conscience.After the disappearance and suspected murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi from the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, executives who’d been lined up for the “Davos in the Desert” Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh this month are getting cold feet.JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and his peer at Blackstone Group LP Steve Schwarzman, along with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Uber Technolog

Viewpoints Oct. 18, 2018

Calm down, the world’s biggest car market isn’t going to drive off a cliff. Sales to dealerships in China fell for a third month in September, dropping almost 12 percent from a year earlier, data showed Friday. Retail sales declined 13 percent. Total vehicle sales could now be on track for their first annual drop in more than two decades. Scary stuff. But much of this is a readjustment after years of outsize growth in an industry that churns out more than 20 million cars a year. It’s perhaps too

Viewpoints Oct. 17, 2018

It was a busy last week for Brazilian yahoos. In Salvador, a seaside town in Bahia state, a martial arts master was stabbed to death. His offense? Admitting he’d voted for the candidate from the left-wing Workers’ Party. In Recife, a government employee wearing left-wing campaign buttons landed in the hospital after being set upon by sympathizers of right-wing presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro. An angry mob of his supporters in Rio de Janeiro also beat up a transgender singer; lesbian, gay, bi

Viewpoints Oct. 17, 2018

Climate change is a menace. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report showing how serious the situation is. If warming continues on its current trajectory, the report warns, then by the end of this century average temperatures will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.That may not sound like a big rise, but in fact the results will be catastrophic. Already, the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution star

Viewpoints Oct. 16, 2018

The staggering tariffs being levied on China will almost certainly test President Donald Trump’s claim that “trade wars are easy to win.” He might be right, but the president doesn’t seem to have contemplated a different question: What happens when trade wars come to an end?When one country imposes tariffs on another, the eventual resolution of the conflict does not necessarily mean a return to the status quo. Instead, the penalties levied in the heat of a trade war can have destructive ripple e

Viewpoints Oct. 16, 2018

Most of all, I am disoriented by the speed at which major news events pass into the rearview mirror in contemporary America.　Last week a man was alleged to have mailed in letters to the Pentagon containing the raw material for ricin poison. No one seems to have been harmed, but if this had happened in, say, 2003, it would have been a major news story for weeks or months. Now I type “ricin” into Google and the top news results are a week old. There hasn’t been much coverage lately, nor have the 2

Viewpoints Oct. 15, 2018

The last message that now former Interpol President Meng Hongwei sent to his wife was an emoji depicting a knife. Soon after, he disappeared into China’s feared and opaque Ministry of Public Security, the subject of a corruption investigation about which no details have been revealed. The disappearance is a blow to Meng’s family, Interpol and China’s aspirations to lead similar international organizations in the future.That’s bad enough. But the impact of China’s power play will be even more far

Viewpoints Oct. 15, 2018