Column Archive

Depending on which headlines you scanned over your morning coffee last week, World War III seemed to be on the verge of breaking out, either in the skies over the Sea of Japan or on the water in the Strait of Hormuz. Luckily, neither the South Korean air force’s muscular interception of a joint Russian-Chinese air patrol—including the firing of flares and warning shots—nor Iran’s seizure of a British oil tanker triggered the next conflagration. Still, all the sensational spin about end-time tripwires is a clear indicator of how a doomsday mindset is clouding our thinking about today’s multipolar world. […]

Latin America is experiencing the largest migration crisis in its modern history, with millions of people fleeing desperate conditions in Central America and Venezuela in search of refuge elsewhere in the hemisphere. Nowhere has the human drama translated into a more acute political battle than in the United States, where President Donald Trump has placed immigration at the center of his administration’s agenda, making it a prominent issue in the nation’s political debate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Judah Grunstein, WPR’s editor-in-chief and a longtime friend, offered a thoughtful analysis of the reasons triggering the […]