Just a few years ago, fatigue from “Anglo-Saxon lecturing” was a hallmark of authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Now it’s surfacing in mainstream European media -- a sign that, after Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, the English-speaking world is losing intellectual legitimacy.　On Thursday, El Pais, Spain’s newspaper of record, published an article in English by its Editorial Director Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, entitled “Anglocondescension.” Dripping w

French President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to loosen the country’s labor code are innovative and welcome. They might help attract more investment. But if France truly wants to reconcile the interests of companies and workers, it also needs a different kind of reform -- one focused on protecting people, not jobs.　Macron’s plan increases legal penalties for “wrongful” dismissals, while curbing the ability of courts to grant workers even greater compensation. This is the right approach; the problem

Donald Trump is reinventing the kowtow for the Twitter age. Last week, in fawning tweets, he celebrated Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “extraordinary elevation” at the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, and in a TV interview he bragged that he and Xi had the best “president-president” relationship ever. It was over the top -- especially in light of the fact that Xi is an authoritarian leader.Clearly, Trump, a man not known for his humility, wants something. China is the most important stop o

With the indictments of two campaign associates of then candidate Donald Trump, and the guilty plea of one of his foreign policy advisers, some people are starting to talk again about the possibility of impeachment. Let’s put contemporary issues to one side and instead ask an enduring question: Did the framers get impeachment right? In other words, does the Constitution strike the right balance?　To answer, we need to separate two decisions made during the founding era. The first involves the sta

The Rohingya people of Myanmar have long been despised and persecuted as a Muslim minority in a majority-Buddhist country. Now, they are being slaughtered.A brutal campaign of terror has driven more than 600,000 of the Rohingya to flee the country to neighboring Bangladesh, and a political and humanitarian crisis is rapidly unfolding. The United Nations calls it “a textbook case of ethnic cleansing.”The exodus was sparked by a disturbing escalation of long-simmering tensions between Myanmar’s ma

Great Britain, the country that, during the Industrial Revolution, got the rest of the world hooked on burning coal, is planning to end its own dependence on the dirtiest of fossil fuels. Drax, the operator of Britain’s largest coal-fired power plant, plans to stop using coal by 2020, in line with the country’s effort to phase out coal entirely by 2025.　How will Britain make this happen? In part, by switching to biomass, largely in the form of wood pellets. Biomass already accounts for about 8 p

Social entrepreneurship is a concept perfectly suited for Emmanuel Macron’s France: It sounds both left-wing and right-wing, speaks of innovation and compassion, and is a little fuzzy.　But while the hype seems deceptive, the numbers tell a good story. According to official figures, employment in social businesses, defined as corporations, for-profit or not, incorporated with “solidarity and social utility” as a key goal and reflecting it in their governance structure, grew by 24 percent between

The Indonesian military killed as many as 1 million suspected communists in the mid-1960s, paving the path for a dictator, Suharto, who ruled the country for more than three decades. Newly declassified documents from the US embassy in Jakarta reveal an extraordinary degree of American complicity in what remains one of the Cold War’s biggest crimes. The US not only ignored information that could have prevented the atrocity; it facilitated the killings by providing the Indonesian military with mon

Fentanyl is the synthetic opioid driving America’s public health crisis. Its cheap price, widespread use, addictive quality and deadly effect make it more dangerous than other narcotics classified by the DEA.It is, ultimately, a chemical. And it’s being used as a weapon in China’s 21st century Opium War against America.President Donald Trump’s 12-day, five-nation Asia tour will focus on North Korean nukes and international trade. In Beijing, however, he plans to address China’s fentanyl producti

Perhaps you’ve heard a little something about President Donald Trump fighting publicly with members of his own party. The media loves these he-said-then-he-said stories of political conflict. They’re so easy to cover and self-destructive to the GOP cause. So they’re churned out day after day, enabling this president to manipulate coverage through mere tweets and dominate consecutive news cycles.What you haven’t heard much about is the acidic disarray among Democrats. That’s understandable. Democ