Tag Archives: Op-ed

Now, those prophesizing war have a point. If you take civil conflict from recent history, you find a chillingly familiar list of initial conditions: politics hardening along identity lines; a surge of armed groups; an erosion of institutions. Ethnic polarization and democratic backsliding are especially persistent predictors of state collapse. But apply this to the United States with care. The data driving these results comes from predicting massive acts of violence – genocide or...

In 2016, democracy rating organizations began downgrading the United States, some scoring American institutions below that of El Salvador, then Nigeria, then Iraq. Then, following the Jan. 6 insurrection last year, articles and books began predicting something scarier: another civil war.The most sensational accounts foretold a national breakup, neighbor killing neighbor. The more level-headed ones warned of something still dire: a far-right insurgency waging a long campaign of bombings and...

That is my op-ed today in the L.A. Times. I really do think the ruin of war is a useful lens to look at conflict. It also helps us see how this conflict might end, why it might end faster if NATO is unconditional in its support for Ukraine, and why I think that stance is worth the great risks it entails. First, the rest of the op-ed:Even Vladimir Putin, author of the world-changing conflict in Ukraine, tried to avoid war in his own insidious way. For two decades, he employed every underhanded...

Europe suffered a historic defeat on Thursday night. After weeks of impasse, the Eurogroup gathering of finance ministers, whose countries share the euro, reached a decision on their collective response to the coronavirus pandemic’s economic impact. Besides constituting an epic dereliction of duty, the Eurogroup’s decision dealt a decisive blow to the foundations of the European Union – much to the delight of...

Steven Mnuchin’s snide remark about teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos outraged liberal commentators. US treasury secretary Mnuchin, responding to Thunberg’s call for an immediate exit from fossil fuel investments, said that she should go to college “to study economics” before “she can come back and explain that to us”. Two days earlier, Trump had referred...

The motives and thinking behind Brexit were even less worthy than those behind US President Richard Nixon’s move in 1971 to ditch the Bretton Woods system. But, as with the “Nixon shock,” there is a singular underlying historical factor that explains Brexit. ATHENS – At pivotal historical moments, rational political ruptures often are brought about for all the wrong reasons. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s...

Nationalism and speculation have seldom had a better opportunity to combine forces as the one riding today on the coattails of Covid-19, known as the coronavirus. When Covid-19 leapfrogged from China to Italy, even ardent Europeanists normally appreciative of open borders joined the deafening calls to end freedom of movement across Europe’s national borders – a longstanding demand of nationalists. Meanwhile, the...

Spring is already in the air across Greece. Even in the bleakest of times, nature’s renaissance renders hope irrepressible. But this one is proving a cruel spring for a people caught up in a decade-old crisis yielding one ritual humiliation after another. Costas runs a small bookshop in my central Athens neighbourhood. Although jovial by constitution, he finds it difficult to hide the worry lines multiplying on...

Ursula von der Leyen’s signature proposal co-opts the slogans of climate activism, but has none of the substance Emergencies tend to reveal our true priorities. When our house is burning down or the storm waters are flooding in, we hold on to what we value most, and leave the rest behind. A decade ago, the leaders of the European Union found themselves facing such a moment. With the French and German banks...

REVIEW: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo A recent YouGov survey confirmed that economists are the least trusted professionals in the UK today. Brexit is only the latest contributor to the public’s understandable rejection of a profession that has either failed spectacularly to raise the alarm over impending crises or have provided...