Born Red

Xi is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first who was born after the revolution, in 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of eighty-seven million members of the Communist Party, an organization larger than the population of Germany. The Party no longer reaches into every corner of Chinese life, […]

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The Donald Trump Show Is Eating Television

In the years before the 2016 election, cable news was approaching a demographic cliff and an existential crisis. Average primetime viewership on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC had declined by about a third between 2008 and 2014…But in 2015, Donald Trump descended an escalator, a slow-motion meteorite crashing into the earth with biosphere-altering potential. Read […]

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Pakistan’s Radicalisation Problem Begins At School

Pakistan’s religio-nationalism started under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1972-77) and got a major impetus under General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation drive through the 1980s. This drive was also located in nurturing public acceptance of jihad as state policy in Afghanistan and later in India. Sadly, we have indoctrinated at least one or two generations with the idea that […]

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Navigating Great Power Rivalry In The 21st Century

The post-Cold War international system is coming to an end, and with it easy assumptions about the character of U.S. strategy toward the world’s great powers. After a period in which a dominant, U.S.-led Western coalition largely set and enforced the rules of the international order — and in which other major powers, such as […]

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Xi Jinping May Be Less Powerful Than He Seems

On the one hand, while Xi—a seasoned politician with a large staff who have likely been preparing for this meeting for months—is much better prepared for this week’s summit than Trump, he may also be more constrained than the White House expects, both in terms of what he can push and what he can offer. […]

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