Predictably, Iran is reacting badly to the announcement that Europe is planning to send a multinational naval force to protect merchant ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We heard that they intend to send a European fleet to the Persian Gulf which naturally carries a hostile message, is provocative and will increase tensions,” said an Iranian government spokesman last week.In combination, the Europeans’ welcome decision to increase the warship count and the Iranian re

Singapore is Asia’s Monte Carlo: a playground for the wealthy. The city-state has two casinos, an annual Formula One race and the third-highest concentration of ultra-rich individuals after Monaco and Geneva. It’s home not just to the “Crazy Rich Asians” caricatured in the eponymous movie, but also, increasingly, Brazilian and British billionaires.Even the affluent in recently turbulent Hong Kong are beginning to find the rival financial center a safer option for their mo

The incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has laid out a highly ambitious climate agenda. In her first 100 days in office, she intends to propose a European Green Deal, as well as legislation that would commit the European Union to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Her immediate priority will be to step up efforts to reduce the EU’s greenhouse-gas emissions, with the aggressive new goal of halving them (relative to 1990 levels) by 2030. The issue now is how to

Last week’s Democratic presidential debates included little substantive discussion of foreign policy -- even about an imminent troop-withdrawal agreement for Afghanistan -- and most of the candidates seemed as eager to retreat from the world as President Trump. The debaters looked eerily like “America First” Democrats, with scant concern about how the United States should protect its interests abroad. Their eagerness to withdraw from Afghanistan matches that of Trump, who wants

July 27 saw a new post-Soviet era record set in Moscow: 1,373 people were taken into custody following a day of protests. Meanwhile, jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny suffered a strange “allergic reaction” after calling for the demonstrations. These developments were set in motion by something seemingly trivial: An election to Moscow’s city council. One of Russia’s weakest regional legislatures, it can’t even hold the capital’s mayor responsible for doin

Among intelligence professionals, President Donald Trump’s nomination of an inexperienced, partisan politician to oversee America’s spy agencies prompted deep dismay -- but also a stolid reaffirmation of the spymaster’s credo: Let’s get on with it. This combination of incredulity and stoicism was voiced by a half-dozen current and former officers I spoke with Monday about Trump’s choice of Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, to become director of national intelligence. Th

A star is born, one too bright to behold without wondering how long it could burn. Yoon Seok-yeol, South Korea’s new prosecutor-general, has already led investigations into “past evils” for two years as head of the Seoul Prosecutors’ Office amid claims that President Moon Jae-in was carrying out a political vendetta. Until the meteoric rise of his career, one rarely seen in the nation’s history of law enforcement, he had moved from one remote provincial prosecutors&

It’s time for the Democrats to winnow.Twenty presidential candidates were set to debateTuesday and Wednesday. It’s their second round, and the last with so many candidates split over two nights. After this there’s a break until September, and the Democratic National Committee is making it harder to qualify for the next round. At best, maybe a dozen candidates will still be debating in September, and it’s hard to believe that anyone who can’t qualify can recover to w

When I first came across Richard Kim’s “The Martyred” in 1967, I was an intellectually adventurous and emotionally vulnerable college freshman. At the time, I was intrigued and mesmerized by the novels of Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. “The Martyred,” too, was a thought-provoking novel that resonates with Camus’s nihilistic existentialism and saturated with a philosophical rigor comparable to Dostoevsky.The story of is set in Pyongyang, the capital city o

Last spring, a Korean friend used the phrase “things people can still do” in broad conversation about business and current events. Last week, I was reminded of the phrase when I took a ride in a driverless car for the first time. There was a driver, but he was there as a backup in case something went wrong. The car had no steering wheel and the driver had very little to do except start it after the passenger was safely seated. It handled curves and corners better than most drivers an

How did the world’s two most venerable and influential democracies -- the United Kingdom and the United States -- end up with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson at the helm? Trump is not wrong to call Johnson the “Britain Trump” (sic). Nor is this merely a matter of similar personalities or styles: It is also a reflection of glaring flaws in the political institutions that enabled such men to win power. Both Trump and Johnson have what the Irish physicist and psychologist Ian Hughe

One of the most striking things about Boris Johnson, who became UK prime minister last week, is how precisely he fits the stereotype of the eccentric upper-class Brit. With his elevation, Britain joins several other major nations led by people who embody their national stereotypes, and not the best of them at that; it could be argued, however, that it’s leaders defying such cliches who take their countries forward.In a paean to Johnson published on Quillette, his onetime Oxford schoolmate

On Wednesday, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the likely successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, took over as Germany’s defense minister. In a speech to parliament outlining her priorities, AKK, as she is known, said she would “hold fast” to the goal of increasing the country’s defense spending to 2 percent of economic output -- but that Germany would aim to attain military spending of 1.5 percent gross domestic product by 2024, when North Atlantic Treaty Organization member s

KOBANI, Syria -- In the direct and disciplined voice of Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the Syrian Kurdish militia, you can hear the determination that has made the Kurds a great partner for America, and one of the extraordinary survival stories of the Middle East. Mazloum quietly enumerates the sacrifices made by his group, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the obliteration of the Islamic State here: 11,000 of his fighters were killed, 24,000 were wounded, and many thousands of civi