Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a resounding election victory on Friday that will allow him to end three years of political paralysis and take Britain out of the European Union by Jan. 31. Brexit represents the country’s biggest political and economic gamble since World War Two, cutting the world’s fifth largest economy adrift from the […]
China’s diplomats are waging an increasingly assertive public relations campaign to counter growing international criticism over its handling of the unrest in Hong Kong, now in its seventh month. Diplomatic and political pundits believe the heightened activism among Chinese envoys underlines an overriding priority to prevent further internationalisation of what Beijing insists is an internal […]
Genuine ideological differences have returned to British politics. That is as true in foreign policy as in questions of domestic politics. The post-Cold War foreign policy consensus in UK politics around liberal multilateralism is fraying. Read Here – Chatham House
If it’s true that no person ever consciously chooses evil — a philosophical saw suggested by Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of the author of Frankenstein — Aung San Suu Kyi’s transformation from perfectly sympathetic former political prisoner to perfectly unsympathetic alleged war criminal is even more baffling. Read Here – OZY
Social media and smartphones have pushed voters further away from mainstream news sources toward friends, memes, and Facebook for “news” that may be anything but. British voters are awash in a sea of trivia, propaganda, and three-word slogans—and no one knows what they will make of it all. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
Since the invention of writing, human innovation has transformed how we formulate new ideas, organise our societies, and communicate with one another. But in an age of rapid-fire social media and nonstop algorithm-generated outrage, technology is no longer helping to expand or enrich the public sphere. Read Here – Project Syndicate
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente (“cooperation”) with Moscow. And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his […]
Reflecting on the future of the global order, the late Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew warned that the rise of China is so consequential that it won’t only require tactical adjustment by its neighbours, but instead an overhaul in the global security architecture. As the former Asian leader bluntly put it, though “[t]he Chinese will […]
Last May, in the weeks leading up to his presidential inauguration, Volodymyr Zelensky learned that a man named Rudy Giuliani wanted to meet with him. The name was only distantly familiar. But the former mayor of New York City was the personal attorney of the president of the United States… Zelensky understood that it might […]
The conventional Western view is that China faces the alternatives of integrating with the West, trying to destroy it, or succumbing to domestic violence and chaos. But the Chinese scholar Lanxin Xiang instead proposes a constitutional regime based on a modernized Confucianism. Read Here – Project Syndicate
looking beyond borders 