Emmanuel Macron has followed the old adage: Never waste a good crisis.　As relations with Italy go from bad to toxic, the French president has taken the unprecedented step of recalling his ambassador from Italy -- the kind of diplomatic spat that doesn’t usually happen between big EU member states. It’s calculated to embarrass Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, who brazenly met with the yellow vest protesters on French soil.　But i

All over America, teens have a new role model. Become president and you only have to work an hour or two a day. The rest is “Executive Time.”　You can play golf nearly 50 percent of the time. You can watch your favorite shows, tweet to your heart’s content, insult opponents at will.　You don’t even have to get up early to walk down the hall to the office.　You don’t have to read briefing papers -- someone will sum them up for you. If the briefers are boring, you can dismiss them until next week, ne

Iraqi President Barham Salih measured his words in a telephone interview from Baghdad on Monday. He didn’t want to worsen a quarrel with President Trump over US access to an air base in western Iraq. But Iraqi politics is fragile, and ill-considered statements by American presidents can have big consequences. “I appreciate what the US has done to help Iraq,” Salih told me. “We honor that sacrifice. But this success in Iraq is precarious and should not be unduly burdened. It could easily unravel.

As the crisis in Venezuela enters its third week, many well-intentioned observers are seeking a middle way. To prevent civil war, they say, the opposition and dictator should compromise.　Mexico and Uruguay have offered to mediate the conflict between strongman Nicolas Maduro and Juan Guaido, whom most of the Western Hemisphere regards as Venezuela’s president. Greece has also said it supports negotiations. Two well-respected economists identified as “experts in Latin America” are recommending an

In September 2018, we argued that China’s economic and foreign policies were defying the “laws” of economics and geopolitics, and warned that the situation could not last. Since then, our assessment has been borne out, and our concerns have deepened.Until recently, China had been able to pursue a unique development path, owing to the government’s far-reaching control over the economy (and society more generally). But those days are over. The country’s internal debts are mounting to unsustainable

Close on the heels of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to tax top income at 70 percent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has released her own big idea -- a tax of 2 percent a year on all wealth above $50 million, rising to 3 percent for those fortunes of more than $1 billion. The proposal, which would affect about 75,000 of the country’s wealthiest people, also comes with a set of measures designed to reduce avoidance and evasion.　The motivation for taxing wealth directly undoubtedly come

After slamming his intelligence chiefs as “passive and naive” and telling them to “go back to school,” US President Donald Trump tried to paper over his Twitter tantrum Wednesday.　Facing sharp criticism for such a public attack -- unprecedented for a US president -- Trump now claims “the media” distorted the testimony of top US intelligence chiefs before the Senate Intelligence Committee -- where they sharply diverged from Trump on the ranking and nature of the most urgent security threats.　Ther

Every White House in the modern era has sought to be prepared in case a vacancy arises on the Supreme Court. President Donald Trump’s legal advisers don’t know much more than anyone else about the likelihood of a vacancy this year, but they are making contingency plans. Those plans center on the possibility that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 85 the oldest justice, will leave the court.At the moment, there appear to be seven leading contenders, who can be loosely grouped into a first and second tier ba

Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. Sen. Kamala Harris. Every day, it seems, another candidate enters the Democratic race. Every week, there’s a new poll, most showing former Vice President Joe Biden as the party’s early presidential leader.The highly respected Cook Political Report even put out its first estimate of the 2020 Electoral College map, showing the Democrats with 232, the Republicans with 220 and the remaining 86 as

Transparency International, the Berlin-based global authority on graft, accompanied its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 with a warning that corruption gains where authoritarian and populist leaders erode democratic institutions. A comparison of Transparency’s data with studies by Freedom House, which scores countries on the state of democracy and liberty, reveals a more complex story but leads to the same conclusion.Putting the two organizations’ country scores side by side shows that the