Opinions

By Paul Morland “One hundred and forty-six million [people] for such a vast territory is insufficient,” said Vladimir Putin at the end of last year. Russians haven’t been having enough children to replace themselves since the early Sixties. Birth rates are also stagnant in the West, but in Russia the problem is compounded by excess...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could mark a troubling shift: the end of a relatively peaceful global era. Though it has not always felt like it, the world has since the 1990s endured less war than any other period in recorded history. Wars and resulting deaths plummeted with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1991...

By Chris Hedges The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalismwith freedom. In the name of national security, the...

By Geoff Shullenberger Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine consumed the media, New York Times columnist Jay Caspian Kang and Substacker Matthew Yglesias published near-simultaneous critiques of the notions of “disinformation” and “misinformation”. This convergence among prominent liberals was significant. These and related concepts like “fake news” have shaped press coverage of a range...

By Francis Fukuyama I’m writing this from Skopje, North Macedonia, where I’ve been for the last week teaching one of our Leadership Academy for Development courses. Following the Ukraine war is no different here in terms of available information, except that I’m in an adjacent time zone, and the fact that there is more support...

By German Lopez Europe’s assertive response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented a possibility that was hard to imagine a month ago: the European Union as a superpower that can alter the global order, promoting liberal democratic values worldwide. Before the war, the E.U. focused largely on economic growth. It resisted calls, particularly from...

By Vasko Kohlmayer It is hard not to be deeply shaken by the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine. Terrible though it may be, it was not, however, unexpected. By taking matters into his own hands, Vladimir Putin did what he had warned he would do in the years leading up to this crisis. Putin has always...

By Jake Johnson If a single word can encapsulate why — two years into the global Covid-19 pandemic — the virus continues to spread widely and kill thousands of people each day despite the availability of lifesaving vaccines, the humanitarian group Oxfam International on Thursday suggested that word is “greed.” In a new report titled...

By Isaac Chotiner The political scientist John Mearsheimer has been one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps best known for the book he wrote with Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Mearsheimer is a proponent of great-power politics — a school...