“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a senior British official was quoted as saying to Newsweek in 2002, witnessing the competitive bellicosity in the Bush administration’s run-up to the war in Iraq.　US President Donald Trump asserted his claim to be a real man as he tore up the nuclear deal with Iran. But he has inadvertently accelerated rather than delayed an inevitable process: the emergence of Iran as a major geopolitical and scientific power in a world that is n

It wouldn’t be hard for North Korea to become the next Vietnam, if only Kim Jong-un loosened up a bit.　North Korea today looks remarkably similar to the Southeast Asian nation in 1986, when its communist neighbor undertook “Doi Moi” reforms to tiptoe toward capitalism. North Korea may have a head start, because it’s richer and more industrialized.　Vietnam is now a huge manufacturing hub, boasting an economy that’s six times larger than North Korea’s. Last year, it expanded 6.8 percent, the faste

US President Donald Trump’s sudden concern over Chinese jobs may indicate a realization that neither a failed nor a nationalized Chinese telecoms equipment maker would be in America’s best interests.　It may also indicate just how important his meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un really is.　To recap: ZTE Corp. is a Chinese company that makes telecoms equipment and mobile phones. It previously broke a US embargo on Iran by using American chips in equipment it sold to the Midd

US President Donald Trump recently proposed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure program. This is a good idea with bipartisan support, assuming we can finance it. But infrastructure alone will not produce the long-term inclusive growth we yearn for. To achieve that, America instead needs a comprehensive economic development strategy.　That means America’s struggling communities have to simultaneously invest in many different types of capital to generate growth: infrastructure, health, education and sma

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a canny politician, an extraordinary statesman and an astute analyst of geopolitics. At times it was hard to tell which hat he was wearing.That seems to have been the case when, speaking to the press in 1996, a little more than three decades after his city was ejected by Malaysia and forced to become a nation-state, Senior Minister Lee boldly speculated on the idea of a re-merger.　Let politicians across the causeway that links the neighbors dro

My wife and I were docents of Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, when I worked in nearby Washington, a city named for a former parishioner. Yes, George Washington went to church there. As I used to explain to tourists, he had even helped get the place built and had his own pew box, but docents will maybe be quiet about that now. Washington, you see, had slaves, and, in the form of a 150-year-old, marble plaque hanging in the sanctuary, he is being expelled from the church. As a politically z

Last week I chatted with Columbia University paleontologist Dennis Kent about some new work he and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the surprisingly big influence of Venus and Jupiter on the climate of Earth. The gravitational tug of the second and fifth planets from the sun act to stretch Earth’s annual orbit like a rubber band, pulling it into a more oblong ellipse and then back to something very close to a perfect circle over a cycle of 405

What would Karl Marx think of contemporary China? China certainly seems to think highly of Marx, holding celebratory events this month for the 200th anniversary of his birth. The government even sent a large statue as a gift to his hometown of Trier, Germany. China is proudly parading Marx and his thought as an alternative to Western liberalism.　I think Marx, if he could be magically reincarnated, would love today’s China but not for the reasons Beijing might appreciate. He would see China as a

It’s been nearly two years since the UK voted to leave the European Union. But the intervening period has done nothing to resolve the question of what that should mean.　Consider the latest Brexit-related fracas, which has seen members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet publicly squabbling about Britain’s future trade relationship with Europe. For many Brexit supporters, the debate has become a test of whether the UK is really leaving, or just pretending to.　This isn’t a polite disagreement: