If you like betting on embattled underdogs, President Tsai Ing-wen is worth a look. She’s tempting the wrath of her powerful neighbor in mainland China by arguing that Taiwan must maintain its own open culture, democratic values and, yes, its sovereignty. Tsai is a petite woman, dressed in a plain black suit, who speaks the careful language of a Cornell-educated lawyer. But her low-key message of self-determination makes her something of a rebel in an Asia where China’s autocratic President Xi J

Viewpoints Dec. 13, 2018

When Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, he didn’t know he was walking into a killing zone. He had become the prime target in a 21st century information war -- one that involved hacking, kidnapping and ultimately murder -- waged by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his courtiers against dissenters.How did a battle of ideas, triggered by Khashoggi’s outspoken journalism for the Washington Post, become so deadly? That’s the riddle at the center of the column

Viewpoints Dec. 10, 2018

Listen to the voice barking orders on a Russian ship last Sunday as it drove straight toward a Ukrainian tug: “Crush him from the right. ... Do it! Do it! (Expletive) cut him off!” And then, just before the deliberate collision, a satisfied: “Hold on, everyone.” What you sense is the raw exuberance of Russian power, in the audio and video recordings released by the Ukrainian interior minister and posted on YouTube by BBC News. The Russian captain snarls obscene, bellicose orders to his crew -- c

Viewpoints Dec. 2, 2018

If President Trump is the dealmaker he claims to be, he should use the upcoming G20 summit in Buenos Aires to declare a win in his trade war with China -- before his bombast does any more damage to the global economy.Trade is Trump’s signature issue. But more than a year after he began threatening tariffs on major trading partners, he has relatively little to show for it. The improvements in NAFTA are modest, at best. The US economy hasn’t suffered significantly, but global growth is beginning t

Viewpoints Nov. 25, 2018

Here‘s a simple four-word wish for Thanksgiving 2018 -- a day when most of us take a break from the blurring, dizzying speed of our internet world: Let’s slow things down.I don‘t just mean stopping to smell the roses, or taking a hike in the woods, or hiding our screens for a few hours. I mean, literally: Slow down the circuits. Put more friction in the system. Make social media slower, more local and less instantly connected to people we don’t know. Our hyper-fast world has become destructive.

Viewpoints Nov. 22, 2018

While the bombastic US-China “trade war” has been getting the headlines, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been waging a quieter battle to combat Chinese theft of trade secrets from American companies -- a practice so widespread that even China trade boosters regard it as egregious. The Trump administration’s much-ballyhooed campaign of tariffs will eventually produce some version of a truce -- economists say that any other result would amount to a mutual suicide pact. But the ba

Viewpoints Nov. 18, 2018

One of the assumptions that economists sometimes use to frame their models is to specify that some variables will be held constant, a concept that’s expressed with the Latin phrase “ceteris paribus.” We often make the same mistake in politics and foreign policy. We concentrate on our own domestic issues and assume that the rest of the world will remain fixed while we sort them out. We’ll get back to you later, in 2021, say. But the world moves on. It’s dynamic, not static: Erratic changes in one

Viewpoints Nov. 15, 2018

What would the ghosts of 1918 -- not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward -- tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? America just finished a snarling, bitterly divisive election, and we’re all puzzling over how to interpret the results. President Trump, meanwhile, headed for Paris last weekend to commemorate the armistice of what historian Margaret MacMillan has ca

Viewpoints Nov. 11, 2018

From a distance, the Tree of Life Synagogue now looks like another American crime scene. Police tape blocks off the Wilkins Avenue entrance of the temple, and patrol cars guard the perimeter with flashing lights.But just at the yellow-tape barrier, the closest spot to the horror of what happened here Saturday, people have left hundreds of bouquets of flowers, cards and posters with a repeated message: We come in grief and solidarity; we speak for a community that will resist the hatred that kill

Viewpoints Oct. 31, 2018

One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy -- the black hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries -- does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU. What’s fascinating about the GRU revelations is that they seem to reflect an aggressive pushback after several years in which Putin (chiefly through the GRU) launched recklessly aggressive co

Viewpoints Oct. 15, 2018

Reading Greg Miller’s gripping new account of President Trump’s entanglement in the Russia investigation, it’s striking just how many of the president’s difficulties have been self-created. Trump sees enemies everywhere around him; he should look in the mirror. As the book’s ironic title makes clear, Trump has been “The Apprentice” in the White House. New to government, buoyed by sycophantic supporters and his own overweening ego, Trump made mistake after mistake: He turned little problems into

Viewpoints Oct. 4, 2018