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The horrific killing of an unarmed African American man, George Floyd, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers late last month and the ensuing demonstrations and riots across the country provide a stark and hardly compelling backdrop to the US administration’s attempt to employ America’s unique soft power by vigorously accusing Iran, China and other […] More
I met David Frum once. That was in 2000, at a Bilderberg conference in Belgium. I had just given a brief analysis of the success of radical right-wing populist parties in liberal democracies when he stormed up to me. Visibly irate, he berated me for having mentioned Preston Manning’s Reform Party of Canada. Once I […] More
Who needs reporters to cover the drama that takes place in the streets of the United States? People with cameras on their cellphones have conveniently replaced traditional news teams. The news media merely selects the videos shot by ordinary people that it will broadcast. The star journalists and the experts they invite to chat with […] More
Although other nations, such as New Zealand, have received kudos for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, one country that has not received the praise it is due from the international media brigade is Tunisia. The small North African country with a fragile economy has achieved a result that many countries, including the UK, should take note […] More
In ordinary times, for the bulk of the American population, presidential election years resemble a period of deep moral sleep whose fitful dreams are stimulated by a media that plays a role not unlike that of the Freudian unconscious. It proposes various devices that include the tracing of candidates’ gaffes, the unveiling of reported scandals […] More
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprisingly participated in the virtual Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in May for the first time since he took office in 2014. Modi had skipped the 2016 and 2019 NAM summits, but his attendance in 2020 could signal a revival of this once-important alliance. The NAM, a Cold War-era grouping of […] More
Complaints about American decline have been commonplace since at least the Vietnam War era. In the late 1980s, declinism experienced an upsurge with the publication of “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” by Paul Kennedy, which warned of the dangers of imperial overstretch. Even America’s putative victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War […] More
As the COVID-19 crisis is gradually slowing down, the world is bracing itself for a very likely second wave of the pandemic. While the shortcomings of the global response and the preparedness of individual countries will be open for debate and analysis for a long time to come, attempting to forecast what architecture the international […] More
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