US drug dealers, beware. According to a recent report in Axios, President Donald Trump admires the freewheeling and brutal manner in which some Asian governments handle drug offenders. “You know, the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem,” a senior administration official paraphrased Trump as saying. “They just kill them.”　In one sense, Trump is right. Over the last two decades, Asia has executed a disproportionate number of drug suspects compared with the rest of the world. In the Phi

China’s defenders are putting an optimistic spin on the country’s tilt toward one-man rule. Now that President Xi Jinping has set himself up to remain in power indefinitely, they suggest, he will have the runway to see through painful but necessary economic reforms that have long been resisted by various actors within China’s political system. In other words, even if last weekend’s scrapping of term limits for the presidency dooms hopes for political liberalization, it increases the prospects fo

Independent counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russians for waging information warfare against the US by tampering with the American electoral process in 2016. Sadly but predictably, America’s commander-in-chief did not respond by rallying his country to meet the threat. Rather, President Donald Trump went out of his way to dodge the question of Russian interference.　This episode has a broader significance: It gives the lie to the idea that the US can have a constructive foreign policy while

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