Column Archive

The United States is “back,” proclaims U.S. President Joe Biden, seemingly as often as he can. The coming week will show if the same is true of the West. At successive summits of the G-7, NATO and the European Union, Biden and fellow leaders will confront a dual task: reviving the community of advanced market democracies and showing that the West is capable of resolving today’s complex transnational challenges. Biden’s election in November heartened the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and understandably so. The new president promised to pick up the mantle of global leadership that Trump had cast aside and […]

While Americans commemorated their fallen soldiers on Memorial Day this week, a group of activists in Luxembourg were inaugurating a different kind of war memorial. Handicap International Belgium, that country’s chapter of an NGO originally dedicated to civilian victims of landmines, unveiled a sculpture by artist Manolis Manarakis commemorating the civilian dead of all modern wars. It was the latest in a series of monument unveilings, including another just last month in Brussels, meant not only to recognize civilian victims of war, but to underscore their absence in the global culture of war memorials. In the United States, Memorial Day […]

Less than one week before a pivotal election in Peru, authorities released a revised count of the pandemic death toll in the South American country. It’s no secret that COVID-19 has devastated Peru, but the figures, nonetheless, were breathtaking. The government put the true number of deaths at 180,764, three times higher than earlier estimates. Other countries will likely recalculate their earlier numbers, as well. But for now, Peru holds the painful distinction of having the world’s highest pandemic death toll by population. Confirmation of just how catastrophic the pandemic has been for Peru helps explain the similarly disastrous political […]

A decade ago, while researching a book about Chinese migration to Africa, I made an extended stay in Namibia, then one of a small number of African countries I had never visited in a lifetime of writing about the continent. To get to know the place as well as I could, I rented a car and drove with my brother, James, throughout much of the country, a land more than twice the size of Germany. The reference here is appropriate, because it was Germany, a relative latecomer to European imperialism in Africa, that colonized Namibia toward the close of the […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Kate Jones is filling in for Emily Taylor, who will be back next week. Around the world these days, social media’s impact on societies is creating understandable tensions. The way in which social media shapes the public conversation has an unpleasant underbelly, exposing and arguably fostering hate and division, while fueling an explosion of objectionable images ranging from child abuse to revenge porn. The risk is that these tensions will become an excuse for restricting freedom of expression, transforming social media from being platforms that enable limitless voices to reach limitless audiences into platforms that allow […]