The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail ...

Eighteen months later, however, the United States is bogged down in a new war in the Middle East. Although the U.S. military has enjoyed tactical successes, Washington has not achieved any kind of ...

Travelers returning from China often report having seen the future. The country’s advances in frontier commercial technologies are visible in the robots that make and serve food in restaurants; the ...

The Middle East has oil, China has rare-earth elements,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared in the early 1990s. This quote has been repeated a lot lately as Beijing has used its near monopoly on ...

Africa’s fertility rate is still roughly double that of Latin America and South Asia, and the median age in sub-Saharan Africa today is 19.5 years, compared with 29.0 in South Asia, 34.0 in South ...

Over the past decade, there has been a growing consensus that democracies around the world are facing a crisis from within. According to a 2025 Pew survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents in 23 ...

Singularly focused on the need to prevent another 9/11, Bush’s modest approach to world affairs morphed into the so-called global war on terror that became the primary paradigm for U.S. foreign policy ...

There is more of a global consensus about the nature of the challenge than ever before, but it has had little effect on Chinese policy. Now, the problem is morphing into a qualitatively new and more ...

In this view, the spread of AI through the economy will generate such tremendous growth that it will generate huge new tax revenues that will help pay off the debt. But any reduction in the debt ...

For decades, Beijing has used trade not only as a means to generate economic growth but also as a geopolitical tool to attract investment, strengthen its industrial base, expand its economy, and ...

But activity is not strategy—and, as demonstrated by the massive strikes across Ukraine and Russia in recent weeks, it has yet to produce results. To make real progress toward peace, Washington should ...

France has a lame-duck president, is toiling under a hung parliament, and faces the possibility of a far-right victory in the next election. Based largely on the author’s reporting, this book offers a ...