The election of South Korean Kim Jong-yang as president of Interpol put an end to fears that the global police cooperation organization would fall under the control of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the controversy surrounding the election lays bare a more important issue: How does one keep international organizations inclusive without leaving them open to abuse?Last week, the Times of London named Russian police general Alexander Prokopchuk the front-runner in the Interpol election made

Ivanka Trump used her personal email account last year to handle as many as 100 discussions of official White House matters. If that doesn’t strike you as a rather ironic turn of events then fine-tune your antennae by looking up any old online video of her father threatening to put Hillary Clinton in jail for using a private email server, calling on Russian hackers to find her missing emails, or praising the FBI for reopening an investigation of the former secretary of state’s “criminal and ille

After more than five years in power, Xi Jinping has constructed a singular political persona: of a leader who places the Communist Party and its authority above all, on top of the state, the economy and military.So it may have come as a surprise to see Xi usher China’s top entrepreneurs into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People earlier this month to offer them reassuring bromides about their importance for the country’s economy. “All private companies and private entrepreneurs should feel totally

For all the recent debate about creating a joint European army, Germany -- which has the second-biggest military in the European Union -- has little interest in setting up any kind of supranational force under the EU’s command. This reluctance is key to understanding the ineffectiveness of all the bloc’s existing military projects.In a recent op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen laid out her vision of “an army of the Europeans” -- note the ch

These days, all looks to be going well on the Korean Peninsula. Guard posts at the DMZ are being destroyed. Southern delegations and inspectors are going to the North to reopen offices and restore railroads. Gifts of mushrooms and tangerines are being exchanged. Images of the smiling North and South Korean leaders fill the news. Speaking the same language, President Moon vouches to world leaders that Kim Jong-un will keep his word to him and denuclearize, thus ushering in a new period of Korean

OPEC has lost what control of the oil market it ever had. The actions (or tweets) of three men -- Presidents Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman -- will determine the course of oil prices in 2019 and beyond. But of course they each want different things.While OPEC struggles to find common purpose, the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia dominate global supply. Together they produce more oil than the 15 members of OPEC. All three are pumping at record rates and each could ra

The lines of Chinese tourists eager to visit Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in the center of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square start building at 7 a.m., and the wait can be three hours. The tourist shops along one side of the square are filled with glossy pendants that feature Mao on one side and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the other.Those pendants are fixed in my mind on my return from my latest trip to China, as the clock ticks down to a critical meeting between Xi and President Trump at the Group of 20

China’s vaunted economic managers aren’t infallible -- and they’re currently making a familiar mistake. They are trying to accomplish too many objectives simultaneously, many of which conflict with each other. Instead of engineering a recovery, the resulting confused policy mix is only feeding a growing feeling of uncertainty among Chinese markets, businesses and households. That will continue to depress growth in China -- and the global economy -- in 2019. To be sure, Chinese leaders deserve so

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, is not a “competitor” to the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- or, as it’s now known after adding the adjectives “comprehensive” and “progressive,” the CPTPP. Yes, the CPTPP very obviously excludes the People’s Republic of China while the RCEP does not. But, unlike the former, the RCEP is a more traditional sort of trade deal, in which tariff cuts on tradeable goods -- rather than high standards for labor, environmental and intellectual-proper

In recent years, we have seen the renewal of a phenomenon that seemed to have passed into history with the end of the Cold War: fierce and potentially violent competition between the most powerful countries on the globe. Yet as dangerous as that competition is in its own right, it is also worsening prospects for solving many of the world’s other problems, from migration to economic crises to climate change.Relations between the great powers -- the US and its allies on the one hand, and revisioni