De-dollarization — that is, the choice that countries in the Global South have been making to conduct their trade in currencies other than the U.S. dollar — is a growing global phenomenon. It has profound implications for the economic situation in not just countries of the Global South but also…

Over the past couple of months, in my essays at Globalities I’ve been tracking the current crumbling of the decades-old system of Washington’s global hegemony and its gradual replacement by a China- and BRICS -led system of multipolarity-and also some of the effects of that shift, in West Asia and…

Suddenly, within the past few weeks, there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity that provides real hope that the civil war that’s devastated Syria for 12 years may be headed toward a negotiated peace and a chance for rebuilding. …

I have long had a lot of respect for the work of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whom I first came across, briefly, when we both working as journos in Beirut in the early 1980s and whom at a personal level I like. His work is generally pretty smart and…

In the United States, relations between China and “the West” are viewed as a trans-oceanic affair, with the Asia-Pacific region forming its main arena of cooperation or competition. …

First, a quick disclosure: As someone extremely fond of the young people in my family, I am deeply concerned about the effect of all social media apps on the lives and psyches of tweens and teens. Not just TikTok, but all of them… So now, on to TikTok and the…

1. The history of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War can be seen as a litany of forceful regime-change projects undertaken in other countries around the world, with the force used being sometimes military, sometimes economic, sometimes both. Among these projects, the invasion of Iraq launched twenty…

This truly was “the handshake seen around the world.” Yesterday, China’s top negotiator, Wang Yi, concluded the diplomacy he and his colleagues have pursued for some months now by bringing together top negotiators from Saudi Arabia and Iran (Musaad bin Mohammed Al-Aiban and Ali Shamkhani) to conclude an agreement under…

Unless your name is Tom Friedman, I guess you’d agree that the world is not flat. But what shape does our world have today-and what shape of a world do we want to build over the years ahead? I’m pulling strongly for the kind of multipolar order in which all…