Every good spy story needs a shadowy operative who does the dirty work for the boss, and thanks to the indictment issued Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller, we now have a nominee for that role in the Russia investigation. He’s a billionaire oligarch named Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and based on Russian and other accounts, he sounds like a real-life version of a James Bond villain. Prigozhin’s fingerprints appear to be on three of the most sensitive operations launched by Russian President Vladimi

Americans love diversity -- or so they like to claim. A 2016 Pew survey found that Americans are much more likely than Europeans to say that diversity makes their country a better place to live.Other polls say the same.　But words and actions are two different things. In the mid-20th century, US cities were known for white flight -- the tendency of white people to move out of neighborhoods when black people moved in. If white Americans pay lip service to the idea of living in a multiracial societ

When Emmanuel Macron was elected French president, the conventional wisdom was that he’d only survive if his policies brought tangible economic growth. So here’s the paradox Macron faces this year: While growth is picking up and many other economic indicators are finally turning positive, his critics have become more numerous. Indeed, his popularity fell during the past month by as much as 5 percentage points. 　The year could not have started better for the French government on the economic fron

If America abandons the liberal international order it created, can that order still endure?　This has been the central geopolitical question posed by Donald Trump’s presidency. So far, longtime US allies have been working to fill the void created by the retreat of American leadership, and to prevent the erosion of a system that has served so many so well for so long. Yet their efforts cannot be more than a temporary solution to the crisis of global stewardship that Trump has created.From the tim

Korean-American writer Min Jin Lee’s mesmerizing novel “Pachinko” takes us back to the times of Japanese rule of Korea, when hundreds of thousands of Koreans moved to Osaka in search of a better life. Since all Koreans had Japanese names at the time, they naively thought they could easily assimilate into Japanese society. But they were wrong. They were kept under constant surveillance by Japanese police and were the last hired and first fired in the job market. When liberation came to Korea in 1

At last, the PyeongChang Olympics began in the face of all the uncomfortable comments on North Korea’s sports diplomacy. Although South Korea labeled the PyeongChang Olympics the “Peace Olympics,” the Trump administration and almost all think tanks in Washington en masse shared skeptical responses to the peaceful phrase. They commonly evaluated Pyongyang’s participation in PyeongChang as strategically planned gestures to gain time and drive a wedge between South Korean President Moon Jae-In and

Nobody knows for sure what GM’s plan is. Maybe the US automaker is just adjusting its business in Korea by closing an underperforming manufacturing plant in Gunsan City, or perhaps it is taking a first step to fold its Korean business entirely. Rumors and conjectures have swirled around the country since the automaker’s latest decision to shutdown the Gunsan factory, but there is no knowing the exact reason of the decision or future plans of the multinational corporation. The government is tryin