Last year turned out pretty well for Chinese President Xi Jinping. The economic slowdown stabilised, relations with neighbours such as the Philippines improved, and Xi strutted the global stage while hosting the Group of 20 for the first time. The year ahead, however, could be more trying as Donald Trump enters the White House and […]
Rafsanjani’s death reflects a growing reality for Tehran’s theocrats. The first generation of revolutionaries are now in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties. They are, literally, a dying breed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has served as Supreme Leader since 1989, will be seventy-eight this year. Read Here – The New Yorker
President Obama has been called the “first social-media president.” It’s both a true and a misleading characterisation. On the one hand, the Obama White House was indeed the first presidency to make use of services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. But on the other hand, these services either didn’t exist or weren’t used by […]
On January 1st, the United Kingdom began the implementation of the Investigatory Powers Act, widely considered the most comprehensive—and intrusive—surveillance law in the Western world. The Act authorizes government access to bulk datasets such as travel logs, financial transactions, biometrics, the interception of digital communications data, the hacking of devices, and requires the retention of […]
The Chinese geopolitical reality is that it is an isolated country that is also deeply divided internally. Its strategic priority, therefore, is internal stability. Isolation amidst internal disorder has been China’s worst case scenario. The government of President Jinping Xi is working aggressively to avert this instability, and this issue defines everything else China does. […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a roll. The catalog of his alarming moves is well-known: Aggression in Ukraine, interference in Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, stepped-up intelligence efforts that may include a hybrid operation to discredit Hillary Clinton, a slick, prolific propaganda machine, support for nationalist and populist movements in Europe. […]
This year marks the most volatile political risk environment in the postwar period, at least as important to global markets as the economic recession of 2008. It needn’t develop into a geopolitical depression that triggers major interstate military conflict and/or the breakdown of major central government institutions. But such an outcome is now thinkable, a tail […]
His command of the issues was solid, his delivery even better. His body language signaled confidence, even though he was the youngest and least experienced person in the room. He had charisma. But most important of all, he made a more powerful case for his country than any Saudi official had done before. Read Here […]
Short of last-minute diplomacy, Donald Trump will inherit another hostage crisis with Iran on Inauguration Day—thirty-five years after the first hostage drama at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran ended, as Ronald Reagan was sworn in, and exactly one year after the Obama Administration’s swap to free five more Americans. Read Here – The New Yorker
Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. […]
