Showing results for "2 march"

Anglosphere unites around anti-Chinese position on Huawei

  • Huawei’s offices in Reading, England. (Reuters) The Anglosphere is by far the oddest animal among today’s great powers, but it is no less real for this. Not a country as China, the US, Japan, and India are, the major English-speaking portions of the former British Empire are...
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Armin Laschet and the populist danger for Europe

  • Like many good English idioms, the phrase "canary in the coal mine" has an interesting history. Given the birds’ rapid heart rate, diminutive size, and high metabolism, canaries served as an early warning industrial safety system for much of the 20th century. The idea was to place a canary in a...
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Battered EU faces a turning point

  • EU Council President Charles Michel after a virtual meeting with EU heads of state to discuss COVID-19 measures, Brussels, Belgium, March 26, 2020. (Reuters) The great American writer, the expatriate James Baldwin, summed up Europe, and its intellectual relationship with America,...
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Beirut’s tragedy was man-made

  • A woman, who was injured by the explosion at the Port of Beirut, sits next to her husband outside their damaged grocery store, August 5, 2020. (Reuters) This past terrible Tuesday, a bloodied young man stopped in a Beirut street to speak to a Western reporter. In that s...
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Biden’s bizarre presidency limps toward electoral shellacking

  • As Richard Adams, the author of the beloved children’s book Watership Down, put it: “Bunnies ... are like human beings in many ways.” This quotation popped into my head last week during the latest bizarre episode in the increasingly bizarre presidency of Joe Biden. Fulfilling the ceremonial s...
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Biden’s political comeback much less than meets the eye

  • Washington insiders read polls like the rest of the country looks at baseball scores: Relentlessly, daily, obsessively. A politician’s “numbers” are akin to understanding his political health. A basic rule of thumb is that any president with an approval rating over 60 percent can tell Congress ...
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Biden’s political gloom set to lift with passing of huge spending bills

  • Thomas Fuller, a 17th-century English theologian, knew a thing or two about political risk when he shrewdly noted, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” US President Joe Biden’s troubles of the past months — soon to be debilitating — must not obscure the equally true reality that he is on the ...
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Boris Johnson’s Houdini act is coming to an end

  • During a recent trip to London, I did my usual deep dive, meeting as many British political players as I could over the course of a fascinating (if frenetic) three days. As ever, my political marathon did its job, giving me a thorough, if impressionistic, view of what is going on in Westminster...
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China's problems show why it won't supplant US

  • A protester hurls a brick at a police station in Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O district. (Reuters) Much has rightly been made over the past decade about the rise of China to genuine superpower status — the only possible long-term peer competitor to the US. Since Deng Xiaoping in...
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China’s coronavirus stress test

  • I have long been skeptical about the conventional political risk narrative that China is effortlessly rising to superpower status. The country faces myriad intractable economic, demographic, political, and geopolitical problems that will slow, and likely even halt, its march to dominance. Thi...
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