The leading figures on the world stage today practice a brutal, smash-mouth politics, a personalized authoritarianism, notes Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose. Old-school strongmen, they do whatever is needed to… Read more »
Does the U.S. risk turning a chance for success in Afghanistan into a shameful failure? If the result of a quick withdrawal is the collapse of the government and… Read more »
Tunisia’s election commission has approved (HT: FP) a list of candidates for the country’s presidential vote. There are 26 candidates, among them the current prime minister and defense minister, a… Read more »
Events in both Moscow and Hong Kong show how single-grievance protests can evolve into wider movements, argues FT analyst Gideon Rachman: Between them, Russia and China represent the major geopolitical… Read more »
The social history of the MENA region is a history of social mobilization and the emergence of civil society. Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens have collectively engaged in resistance,… Read more »
The resurgence of threats to liberal democracy — external and internal — does not refute the principal thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” says a prominent analyst…. Read more »
Opposing the Iranian regime doesn’t have to mean sanctioning its banks and oil, argues Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University’s Iran studies program. Milani cannot be called a squish… Read more »
This spring, as Egypt’s parliament debated handing President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi greater power and allowing him to govern until 2030, speaker Ali Abdelaal declared the proposals were the will of… Read more »
The street has stared down the army, and the army has blinked. So the epic standoff in Algeria — Africa’s largest country, the oil-rich neighbor of Libya, strategically situated on… Read more »
Last year, elements of civil society ran against the established traditional political parties in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, drawing on the experience of the 2016 Beirut Madinati (“Beirut is my City”)… Read more »