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…

For a number of reasons, I am inclined to believe that the landmark piece of reporting that Sy Hersh released last week on Pres. Biden’s decision to bomb the Nord Stream pipelines, got the essential facts of the story right. I also, for what it’s worth, don’t rule out the…

We’ve all seen the pictures. On February 6, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck broad swathes of northern Syria, along with neighboring portions of Türkiye… Türkiye has a functioning government, and since the earthquake it has received and deployed significant amounts of aid from all around the world. But Syria? The delivery…

Over the past eleven months, Ukraine’s people have suffered far too much killing and destruction. Most but by no means all of that devastation has been at the hands of the Russian military. (Residents of the country’s eastern provinces have been hammered hard by the Ukrainian military, over the course…

It was 1947. All around the world, Indigenous peoples living in regions long colonized and controlled by the empires of distant West-European states were rising up against their colonizers, claiming the national independence that the recently formed United Nations had promised them. In India, the strength of the sub-continent’s two…

Over the New Year’s break, North Korea’s military test-fired some short-range (350–400 kilometer) ballistic missiles, while the country’s news agency reported that it was testing a new 600 mm multiple rocket launcher system capable of carrying nuclear weapons. On Saturday, the often erratic-seeming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed his…

The Washington Post reports variously today that the U.S. government is either “ privately encouraging” or more actively “ pushing “ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to reconsider his refusal to negotiate with Russia so long as Vladimir Putin remains President. …