When Britain’s Conservative Party prime minister, Theresa May, called a snap general election on April 18, surprise was complete. This was precisely what she had promised she would not do. But shock soon dissipated. On all available evidence, the prime minister’s volte-face made sense.Her party was massively ahead in the polls. Opposition Labour Party politicians despised their leader, the 68-year-old socialist hard-liner Jeremy Corbyn, at least as much as they disliked May. The stage appeared s

It has been almost a century since the United States walked away from an international accord as significant as the Paris agreement on climate. In 1920, the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles despite the desperate attempts by President Woodrow Wilson to rally support for it. Those attempts likely contributed to a massive stroke that left Wilson incapacitated for the rest of his term.The Versailles treaty brought an end to World War I, and historians agree that in many ways it wasn

Oil markets seem impervious to geopolitical risk. As four Arab neighbors imposed an unprecedented embargo on Qatar on Monday, oil prices briefly jumped 1.6 percent before falling back. The fuel to watch, though, is not oil, but gas. If this dispute is not resolved quickly, it may mean a hot summer in the Gulf.The problem has been simmering for a long time, with three of Qatar’s Gulf Cooperation Council colleagues blaming it for backing Islamist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, and being

Donald Trump has thrown a hand grenade into the global economic architecture that was so painstakingly constructed in the years after World War II’s end. The attempted destruction of this rules-based system of global governance -- now manifested in Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement -- is just the latest aspect of the US president’s assault on our basic system of values and institutions.The world is only slowly coming fully to terms with the malevolence

It‘s a common sight in rural China: rows and rows of low-rise apartment buildings, often topped by solar water heaters the size of kitchen tables. By one estimate, 30 million Chinese households rely upon the devices for hot water. They’re served by 3,000 companies that sell around 1 million of the devices annually. Neither subsidies nor environmental guilt account for the sales, or for China’s place as the renewable hot-water capital of the world. Folks in rural areas have been buying them for t

President Trump was elected on a pledge to put “America first.” But that doesn’t mean alliances should be secondary. Strong bonds are in the country’s best interests, and straining these ties is counterproductive in an increasingly turbulent world.But that’s what Trump did with his profoundly bad decision to take America out of the Paris climate accord, a move as diplomatically dire as it is environmentally unsound.Allies had urged the president to remain in the pact. His rejection of it, and th

As presidential aides H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn briefed reporters on President Donald Trump’s meetings with fellow global leaders, a television screen behind them displayed the latest Washington Post scoop tying Jared Kushner to the probe of possible campaign collusion with Russia.That scene last weekend in Sicily provides an apt portrait of the president’s predicament after a weeklong venture designed to show him as a major player on the international scene. His Middle East initiatives may or

When Russian President Vladimir Putin invited NBC’s Megyn Kelly to question him onstage at a glitzy forum here, maybe he thought he’d have an easier time than Donald Trump did in his confrontation with Kelly during the 2016 campaign. It didn’t work out that way.Putin’s appearance at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was meant to showcase Russia’s role in the global economy. And in Putin’s prepared remarks, he was a smooth, genial salesman for his country. But then came a session wi

We’re past the point of shifting blame. We know who gave us the presidency of Donald Trump, and it wasn’t Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein or James Comey.The culprit was democracy.Even if you defend democracy on the grounds that Trump lost the popular vote, it’s still a lame argument. After all, what kind of sensible political system generates 63 million votes for a thuggish incompetent to become its supreme leader?Democracy was rarely an exercise in smooth sailing. Now, this.“The choice of Mr. Tru

In February 1941, Henry R. Luce, editor and publisher of Time and Life magazines, wrote a striking editorial in Life magazine. It began by lamenting what he saw as Americans’ pessimism, “As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do,” Luce wrote. “As we look toward the future 00 our own future and the future of other nations -- we are filled with foreboding.”Luce went on to exhort President Franklin D. Roosevelt and all Americans to get past this pessimism, to