Whatever Americans think of how President Donald Trump is handling the policymaking part of his job, for a showman, he’s unquestionably making a hash of the ceremonial aspects of the job. But maybe, in the media age, expectations have become unfair too; in much of the rest of the world, unlike in the US, those running the government share responsibility for symbolism.Trump is consistently late to react to tragedies and painfully clumsy when finally speaking about them. Trump’s reaction to the Ch

If we think through the North Korea nuclear weapons dilemma using game theory, one aspect of the problem deserves more attention, namely the age of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-n: 33. Because peaceful exile doesn’t appear to be an option -- his escaping the country safely would be hard -- Kim needs strategies for hanging on to power for 50 years or more. That’s a tall order, but it helps us understand that his apparently crazy tactics are probably driven by some very reasonable calculations, a

By swiftly replacing 11 of 85 regional governors in the past two weeks, President Vladimir Putin is previewing plans to run Russia as a corporation after his all-but-inevitable victory in next year’s presidential election.Long tired of politics, he needs to set up a formal system that doesn’t depend upon former bodyguards and other loyal retainers -- there aren’t enough of them anyway. Instead, he’s seeking to borrow selection techniques from large corporations, according to commentators close t

Another big scandal is rocking corporate Japan. This time it’s Kobe Steel, a major producer, which has confessed to faking data on the quality of its materials. Everything from bullet trains to cars to US-made airliners could be affected. It’s doubtful that the scandal will wreak lasting damage on Japan’s reputation for top-notch manufacturing quality -- after all, every country’s industrial giants suffer this sort of debacle from time to time. But Kobe Steel does show that Japanese companies ne