Category: Analysis

Global democratic recession – for now

     

The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »

Failed coup promotes Erdogan’s ‘narrative of an Islamist defense of democracy’

     

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always had ambitions of surpassing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as the country’s most consequential figure. Now, a failed coup may allow… Read more »

China’s sham show trials ‘like a theater of the absurd’

     

Human rights groups and observers say China’s latest wave of “sham trials” against legal advocates, arrested amid an orchestrated crackdown last July, is mostly a political charade, and to some… Read more »

Beware the ‘Isolationist Temptation’

     

It has been only a quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, but the U.S. is already in the midst of its second great foreign-policy debate of the post-Soviet… Read more »