Geopolitics & international affairs
The American message to Asia this week was two sentences long, and it contained the whole argument in miniature: we are not leaving, and you must pay more. Both statements are true, and the second one is the policy. The messenger was Elbridge Colby, the under secretary for policy at the Department of War, speaking […]
The war that the inauguration promised began before the week was out. Three days after taking the oath in Cali, the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, reported that operations over the weekend had left six members of armed groups dead. The dead include a commander of a FARC dissident faction; the announcement, delivered […]
The last secret of Bashar al-Assad’s nuclear program is being packed up and carried out of Syria, under an agreement almost nobody was told about. The news service Axios reported on Monday, on the word of Israeli and American officials, that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are about to carry nuclear material out […]
Nobody expected the September elections to be fair. That was never the question. The question was whether the state would keep up the forms of fairness long enough to be worth pretending about, and on Monday the Supreme Court answered: no. The court barred Yabloko from the parliamentary ballot, striking the only registered party that […]
The war in the Gulf has acquired a bookkeeping department. On Monday, Donald Trump announced that he will demand compensation from Iran for deaths he attributes to it, going back fifty years. He spoke days after Tehran published its own price for ending the fight: American troops out, sanctions gone, frozen assets returned, and full […]
On Monday afternoon, for thirty minutes, a large part of Taiwan briefly lost its mobile internet. The slowdown was deliberate, announced in advance, and part of the island’s annual war games. For the first time, Han Kuang included a drill that throttled mobile data across central Taiwan, centered on the city of Taichung, to simulate […]
A Ukrainian drone strike killed thirteen people, including a child, in Nizhnekamsk, a city of about 240,000 in the Tatarstan republic, more than 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from the Ukrainian border. Seventy-five people were wounded. The Ukrainian military said it had hit an oil refinery. Nizhnekamsk is an oil hub with a petrochemical plant and […]
The talks are on, and the bulldozers are working. Diplomats prepare another round of negotiations on Monday while Israeli forces keep demolishing houses in the villages along Lebanon’s southern border. Residents stand and watch their homes come down. The houses are not empty shells; they are the homes people lived in. The demolitions follow a […]
Sudan’s war has driven more than fourteen million people from their homes, the largest displacement crisis in the world. Against that catastrophe, a small scholarship program is keeping fewer than four hundred university students enrolled. The number is tiny, but the point of the program is not the number. It is the statement that a […]
Israel is less than three months from an election that a large majority of its own voters say they do not trust. In the July edition of the Israel Democracy Institute’s monthly survey, 70 percent of the public said they see a real chance that someone will try to interfere with the vote. Among Jewish […]
