Neruda’s saga marks one of the 20th century’s greatest literary chase scenes, and the Cold War’s first global manhunt. It wasn’t a hunt for a nuclear engineer, a spy, or even a dissident journalist but for a poet—a poet!—whose love poetry had won him acclaim and book sales around the world, and later earned the 1971 Nobel Prize.
Photo/ White House Flickr
Independence Day events on America’s front lawn, the National Mall, have traditionally been innocently nonpartisan and welcome respites from the divisiveness that has come to constitute everyday business in Washington. Recent presidents have played little or no role in the celebrations.
In reality, China’s longstanding suspicion of foreign influence has not prevented the government or the people from becoming remarkably adept at marshalling the flow of overseas cultural touchstones into the country’s borders, remoulding them into something that isn’t entirely Chinese, but is also totally different from its original form.
While American attitudes on foreign policy tend to change very slowly, surveys conducted since Trump’s election in 2016 capture some interesting shifts, especially among Democratic voters. In the era of “America first,” Democrats are even more likely than usual to rally behind U.S. allies and multilateralism.
The foreign policy implications of an authoritarian world in which each nation strives for narrow advantages and fails to coordinate actions on trade, migration, climate change and other cross-border concerns are not promising. With young people becoming more politically active, their “green” positions may check politicians who try to argue that the “burden” of adjustment should not fall on their nation.
Quietly and discreetly, the planning for Boris Johnson’s premiership has begun. No one wants to be seen measuring the curtains, but his team are confident he’ll be the choice of Tory party members. It would be the most spectacular upset if he is not. Boris has fixed a Brexit deadline — 31 October — and time is short so his aides are concentrating on what to do when — if — he makes it to No. 10.
The biggest challenges to the brittle present system in China don’t come from outsiders concocting destabilizing plots in an imaginary, inimical West, but from Chinese people themselves, which is precisely what the people of Hong Kong are, as Beijing itself has always insisted. Once they get a whiff of them, people everywhere, it turns out, like freedoms of speech and association and the right to fair and impartial justice, and having a more or less direct say in the choice of their leaders.
Trump can’t turn back to campaigning from governing, because he never really bothered to start governing in the first place. With the exception of cutting taxes and especially building a wall on the Mexican border, he’s never shown much interest in learning how the levers of power work or in using them.
In the inquiry into who would be the strongest Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020, Donald Trump is what might be called a hostile witness. “Joe Biden is a dummy,” the President said last week, on his way to Iowa, where Biden, who spent more than three decades in the Senate and eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President and one of his closest advisers, was campaigning.
Demographics may not be destiny, but for students of geopolitics, they come close. Although conventional measures of economic and military power often receive more attention, few factors influence the long-term competition between great powers as much as changes in the size, capabilities, and characteristics of national populations.
