PARIS ― Billionaire Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros is an extremely concerned humanitarian who can be counted on to put his considerable bank balance where his concerns are. Lately, those concerns have included Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states; Syria; immigration rights in America; the U.S. banking system; and the Great Lakes region of Africa, where all the mining opportunities just happen to be. Perhaps he could lay off the generosity long enough for us to recover from

Having ignored Iraq since 2009, the Obama team is now desperately trying to devise a way to prevent its total collapse ― and to roll back the jihadi state newly established on a third of Iraqi territory.The only slim hope of doing either requires the ouster of the leader whom the United States has backed for nearly a decade, Iraq’s paranoid prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.Al-Maliki’s sectarian Shiite politics have driven Iraq’s Sunnis ― a fifth of the country’s population ― into the arms of the

WASHINGTON ― In President Barack Obama’s sometimes maddeningly cautious foreign policy, you can see him struggling to answer what may be the hardest question of his presidency: How should the United States project power in a disorderly world without making the same mistakes it did in Iraq and Afghanistan? Obama, whose deliberative approach often resembles that of a Supreme Court justice rather than a politician, has developed a conceptual framework for combating terrorism and instability. It loo

BARCELONA ― The European Union has brought 28 countries into a closer political and economic union. Paradoxically, it has also made it more feasible to contemplate the breakup of some of those countries.Independence for a small state outside of a political and economic group like the EU would be risky nowadays. Within the EU, however, the barriers between states ― and thus the economic and political risks of independence ― are lower.Consider Scotland, where a popular referendum on independence w

NEW YORK ― For better or worse, economic-policy debates in the United States are often echoed elsewhere, regardless of whether they are relevant. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recently elected government provides a case in point.As in many other countries, conservative governments are arguing for cutbacks in government spending, on the grounds that fiscal deficits imperil their future. In the case of Australia, however, such assertions ring particularly hollow ― though that has not sto

WASHINGTON ― As American policymakers ponder the future shape of the Middle East, they should perhaps recall that the United States was opposed to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, the famous “line in the sand” that is now said to be dissolving. American’s opposition back then was based on its rejection of the secret diplomacy between Britain and France that produced the plan to divide the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The U.S. opposed this neo-colonial carve-up of the region and called instea