Two months after the Italian general election on March 4, amid continuing uncertainty about what kind of government will emerge, a strange complacency seems to have set in. Yet it would be foolish to believe that a country where anti-system parties won 55 percent of the popular vote will continue to behave as if nothing had happened. The populist Five Star Movement, which won by a landslide in Southern Italy, has promised to increase spending on public investment and social transfers, while reve

The four-story building at 55 Savushkina St. that housed the infamous Russian internet “troll factory” that meddled in America’s 2016 election now appears empty. 　The main trolling operation has moved to an impersonal seven-story glass office building in the distant Lakhta business district. I couldn’t enter the building due to tight security. The city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reported late last year that the operation’s workspace has tripled.　Yet, little known to Americans, th

Give President Emmanuel Macron of France an A for effort -- he is pulling out all the stops in his effort to manage the mercurial Donald Trump. Last week, Macron visited Washington for what was surely the handsiest summit in the history of French-American diplomatic relations, as part of his continuing bid to influence a volatile US president by hugging him as tightly as possible.　Macron’s is a strategy that a number of US allies have been pursuing, and so far it has borne some fruit. But now it

On April 17, Bloomberg reported that China had overtaken the United States as Vietnam’s largest export market. According to figures cited by the news organization and tallied by the International Monetary Fund, Vietnam’s exports to China totaled $50.6 billion in 2017, compared to $46.5 billion in exports to the US.If these numbers are accurate, they would represent a significant shift in the triangular relationship between Vietnam, China and the US. As Bloomberg succinctly put it, the data under

President Donald Trump’s handling of the trade relationship with China poses a threat both to the US and to the world economy -- but even his harshest critics agree with him on one thing. China’s bid to dominate the high-tech industries of the future often bends or breaks the rules of liberal international commerce, and needs to be checked.What’s important, and what this administration finds so difficult, is to be smart about it.　Through its “Made in China 2025” blueprint and assorted plans and

Saturday’s announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that his country will stop testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a sign that Kim is ready to do a deal with Donald Trump -- and that he understands how a deal with Trump can be made. It’s a delicate dance that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Iran are no doubt watching closely. If Kim can swing this, the devil himself presumably could.　Even before the US enters an agreement with North Korea

The case for high-skilled immigration to the US isn’t hard to make. All those Ph.D.s in science and technology help build the nation’s advanced infrastructure while adding to the store of human capital and generating national wealth.　As a 2016 Congressional Research Service report stated, “This workforce is seen by many as a catalyst of US global economic competitiveness and is likewise considered a key element of the legislative options aimed at stimulating economic growth.”　 The low-skilled im

President Donald Trump is full of surprises -- major surprises, such as getting elected in the first place. Can he now deliver the biggest surprise of all by getting North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal, something that just might save the world from annihilation?　Probably not, many observers say. They agree it would be hallelujah time if he pulled something like that off in a summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, supreme leader of the socialist slave state. But Kim and his family have spent mur

In July 1971, President Richard Nixon jolted the international status quo -- and set diplomatic nerves worldwide fluttering -- by announcing he would visit China. “Never in history, to our knowledge, have diplomatic relations progressed so fast from the Ping-Pong table to the Presidency,” this page breathlessly observed.　Nixon’s bold overture reshaped the modern world and has paid vast dividends to Washington, to Beijing and to the general stability of global geopolitics.　Now another potentially