People often talk about the current political crisis in the West in antiseptic and impersonal terms: the end of the Tory Party, the decline of neoliberalism, the strengthening of the extreme Right, and so on. But ideologies, parties and tendencies don’t have agency: people have agency. So let’s look at …

The infantilisation of western culture over the last generation or so is an accepted and frequently-discussed reality. But I believe that it has had much more of an impact on western politics than we realise, and that it explains a good part of the Ukraine shambles. Here’s why. A Saturday …

Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means? “How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors …

On February 21, 2024, renowned Russian academic Sergey Karaganov published an analysis, titled “An Age of Wars? Article Two. What Is to be Done,” which is the second part of an article published a month earlier in the same media outlet, Russia in Global Affairs.[1] In the following analysis, Karaganov …

Emerging countries in the “global South” are resisting Western narratives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which isn’t such a bad thing. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva created controversy last Sunday, while attending the African Union summit, when he stated, “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s …

As Tehran moves toward consolidating its regional power, will it agree to ultimately disarm its Arab allies? Can it afford not to? Reports in recent weeks as the Gaza war continues indicate that Iran has asked its allies throughout the Middle East to pause their attacks against U.S. forces, fearing …

Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. …

Man is, by nature, a story-telling animal. We live and die by narratives, the stories we tell about the world and ourselves. Religion, love, family, the nation – all are sustained and nurtured by these narratives. And stories can be beautiful or terrible, or both. While the West had and …

It is a basic tenet of American politics that foreign affairs do not decide presidential elections, but that is not to say that foreign affairs do not play a role in elections. In Miami we would always see the candidates come down, do a photo op at a local Cuban …

What would a Sudanese person watching that country’s renewed civil war — which has killed 14,000, displaced eight million, and threatens 17 million with famine in less than a year — think when they this CBS headline: “Gaza faces unprecedented desperation.” Sudan has a population of 46 million, Gaza only …