Is the West losing Latin America? During the Cold War, this question was feverishly discussed in Washington, and beyond. Now, the return of great-power competition and the potential revival of spheres of influence -- together with the recent wave of left-wing electoral victories in the region -- are giving it renewed salience. For the West, the looming specter of hot conflict with authoritarian ...

US President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia is proving to be more than a little controversial. After taking a tough, supposedly principled stand against the kingdom at the beginning of his administration, Biden is now set to adopt a more conciliatory approach. This about-face has riled critics, but there are good reasons to welcome the shift. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden calle...

After the recent wave of conservative judgments from the Supreme Court on abortion, gun control and environmental regulation, many Americans are looking for alternatives to the courts for ways to enact democratic change. Yet, in the past several years, many state lawmakers -- often Republicans -- have systematically attempted to restrict other traditional paths for political participation. Some ...

One of the pleasures of a visit to South Korea is noticing changes in the language of public and commercial signs, which linguists refer to as the “linguistic landscape.” The rapid pace of change in the country means similarly rapid changes in the linguistic landscape. Some of the changes come from official directives in language policy, but most come from bottom-up changes in how society views l...

In the specter of Shinzo Abe’s shocking assassination, the party to which he dedicated his life secured a resounding victory in Sunday’s upper house election. Now Fumio Kishida, Abe’s sometimes rival, long-serving foreign minister and now successor, must use his mandate to secure what Abe could never: the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s long-held goal of constitutional reform. The 75-year-old...

Today, the Middle East no longer stands out amid what’s happening in the rest of the world. In our nearest neighbor, a former prime minister was assassinated in broad daylight. A demagogue former president is ready to announce he is running in the next election as the incumbent sees his approval ratings drop to the lowest point ever in the US. A prime minister resigns after lying about rowdy par...

Is today’s energy crisis as serious as similar previous ones -- particularly the 1970s oil shocks? That question is being asked around the world, with consumers hit by high prices, businesses worried about energy supplies, political leaders and central bankers struggling with inflation, and countries confronting balance-of-payments pressures. So, yes, this energy crisis is as serious. In fact, t...

During the Trump era, the world anxiously watched America as it rapidly polarized, sharply divided by two radically different, mutually antagonistic groups. America was not always like this. The United States used to be a country of diversity, from which the strength and greatness of America stems. As Donald Trump marched into the White House, however, those good old days were over, and to the w...

The polarization of American politics, a trend that began long before Donald Trump ran for president, isn’t running out of steam. If anything, it’s accelerating. Last month it got a boost from a new source: a conservative Supreme Court majority pushing hot-button issues back to the states -- not only abortion, but also gun control and environmental regulation, with others likely to come. Americ...

Red flags will just hang like limp noodles if their flag-wavers go AWOL on breezeless days. Left unattended, those red bits of cloth will signal no warning alert, send no sense of alarm that urgent action is needed to save lives. And the same goes for even our best-intentioned red flag laws -- such as the one the US Congress just approved, touching off a burst of belated bipartisan self-congratu...