When President Xi Jinping announced in 2015 that China would pump $46 billion worth of investments into Pakistan, the recipients of his largesse seemed less surprised than one might have expected. The military and political elites of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan have long extracted aid from outside powers in return for keeping a lid on things at home. As far back as April 1948, barely eight months after independence, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan assured Pakistani military commanders that

In the first few days of the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security stopped sending investigators overseas to interview refugees seeking asylum in the United States. That was, in effect, a cold stop on processing new applications. The face-to-face interviews are a required part of the vetting process to ensure that potential immigrants pose no risk to American public safety or national security.　Freezing those resettlements -- most of which had already been vetted and approved

The nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula is headed into a confrontation reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. What is the most important lesson for the current crisis from that most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War? The Cuban crisis did not lead to a nuclear war for two main reasons. First, the United States responded to the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba -- a provocation by Nikita Khrushchev, the then-Soviet leader, and Fidel Castro, the then-Cuban leader -- with the rig

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the CEOs of the 100 largest US companies received average pay raises of 6.8 percent, more than offsetting cuts many corporate leaders took in 2015.　Donald Trump was elected president in part by promising that he would “drain the swamp” of establishment interests and look out for the millions of ordinary Americans who have lost jobs and futures due to the actions of Wall Street and corporate executives.　The Trump administration now wants to scrap O

An Indonesian court has sentenced Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the loser in the governor’s race in Jakarta, to two years’ imprisonment for blasphemy against Islam. Known as Ahok, he is a Christian of Chinese ethnicity, a double minority in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority state. His sentence represents a setback for the country’s reputation and future as a moderate, secular democracy.Indonesia’s political contests are vigorous, but generally reasonable in nature. This is fortunate consi

The 19th presidential election in which liberal Moon Jae-in took power marks another evolution of Korean democracy. Most of all, it is the second conservative-to-liberal transition of power. The first such power transfer was nearly two decades ago, when longtime dissident Kim Dae-jung swept into power on the back of the 1997-1998 financial crisis that had battered the conservative government of Kim Young-sam. The first progressive government in decades was succeeded by another liberal, Roh Moo-h