Malaysia’s political chaos inched closer to a resolution as interim premier Mahathir Mohamad was summoned to meet with the country’s king, amid a power struggle with his on-off rival Anwar Ibrahim over the prime ministership. Mahathir, 94, resigned as Malaysia’s Prime Minister on Monday after the ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition collapsed. He was subsequently reappointed […]
TV channels and newspapers—especially in India—are likely to devote a considerable amount of coverage to a joint appearance in Ahmedabad, where Trump and Modi will address an expected 100,000 people at the world’s biggest cricket stadium. The glitzy optics of that event will prompt analysis about the budding personal chemistry between the two leaders—how both are men […]
Just the other day, Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, stood in a cage on a podium in his native Aachen, wearing a funny hat and doing his best to be, you know, hilarious. That’s one of his roles in German politics. It was also his job that day, because he was receiving an award […]
The coronavirus outbreak that exploded three weeks ago in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has prompted the most severe government actions in three decades. Cities are closed down, transport links broken, and tens of millions of people effectively quarantined. At a time when the Party and the leadership claim supremacy over every aspect of […]
“What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the […]
New technologies now afford rulers fresh methods for preserving power that in many ways rival, if not improve on, the Stasi’s tactics. Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, for example, allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional surveillance. Not only do these digital […]
This November’s presidential election in the United States will be a referendum on the state of the US economy, the country’s political and social direction, and American democracy itself. Should America – and the world – start preparing for four more years of President Donald Trump? Read Here – Project Syndicate
Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xi’s copycat version has an even more ambitious goal. It is to extinguish faith in God altogether, replacing it with faith in the Chinese Communist Party and the Party’s own “small-g” god of the moment, who is Xi Jinping himself. And it perversely intends to enlist China’s churches, mosques, shrines and […]
The Brexit campaign was transformed from a fringe eccentricity into a mass movement by a handful of people who decided to make it into an argument about identity. Now Brexit itself has created a whole new set of questions about identity. The next political projects, whatever they are going to be, will take off by […]
Historians who study impeachment tend to treat it as a domestic political affair: the bloody combat of partisan politics taken to its extreme, threatening the very survival of a presidency. But when the commander in chief must fight for his political life, the repercussions inevitably ripple around the world. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
