Arab Regimes Are The World’s Most Powerful Islamophobes

Arab regimes spend millions of dollars on think tanks, academic institutions, and lobbying firms in part to shape the thinking in Western capitals about domestic political activists opposed to their rule, many of whom happen to be religious. The field of counter-extremism has been the ideal front for the regional governments’ preferred narrative: They elicit […]

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Why Iran Is So Afraid Of A Free Iraq

Beyond support for armed militias which take orders more from Tehran than Baghdad, Sistani is also aware that Iraqis, including most Iraqi Shiites, resent more mundane issues such as Iran’s dumping of cheap manufactured goods on the Iraqi market, thereby undercutting struggling Iraqi businesses. The anti-Iranian sentiment is so widespread that when fertilizer run-off poisoned […]

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Is America Becoming Trump’s Banana Republic?

The Trump show is endlessly distracting in a way that would be familiar to any connoisseur of the Latin-American strongman. The Wednesday-afternoon Oval Office appearance alone had enough fodder for countless talk-show segments: Trump grounds the airplanes! Trump lies about building the wall! Trump lies about being vindicated in the special-counsel probe —even when a […]

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Why Nationalism Works

Nationalism has a bad reputation today. It is, in the minds of many educated Westerners, a dangerous ideology. Some acknowledge the virtues of patriotism, understood as the benign affection for one’s homeland; at the same time, they see nationalism as narrow-minded and immoral, promoting blind loyalty to a country over deeper commitments to justice and humanity. Read Here […]

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No Country For Strongmen

The BJP and its allies went from governing six of India’s 29 states in 2014 to holding 21 by early 2018. So firm seemed Modi’s grip on power that many Indian liberals began drawing parallels to the slide toward one-man rule in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. A series of surprising setbacks late last year have dissipated […]

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