OUTPOST TO POWERHOUSE SINGAPORE — Under the late Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore — which this week is celebrating its 50th anniversary as a nation — was unabashedly a hierarchical society. When asked if Singapore was a nanny state, he replied that, if it were one, he was proud to have fostered it. But he also…
Earlier this week the embattled Greeks delivered still more body blows to the rotten regime of Keynesian central banking and the crony capitalist bailout state to which it is conjoined. By defaulting on its IMF loan, walking away from the troika bailout program and taking control of its insolvent domestic banking system, Alexis…
These agreements aren’t focused on lowering barriers, but harmonizing global regulations at the cost of sovereignty. Nowhere is this more clear than in the new enthusiasm for special “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanisms. ISDS gives foreign corporations the right to sue national governments for regulations that interfere with their expected profits. It…
In the absence of a common narrative shared by the U.S. and China, the two nations are likely to drift more rapidly apart. Trust builds on itself just as distrust builds on itself as well, compounding into deep enmity over time. BEIJING — I have watched carefully the evolution of China’s concept of a “New…
There is a widespread belief both in Russia and abroad that the Ukrainian crisis has undermined the system of international relations, which was built after the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s and even since much earlier – after the end of World War II in 1945. This belief is…
As megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million people) mushroom across the globe, we need to start thinking about how to make cities better, not simply bigger. When our urban pundit class speaks of the future of cities, we are offered glittering images of London, New York, Singapore, or Shanghai. In reality,…
WASHINGTON — Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or…
A nagging doubt is eating away at the world order—and the superpower is largely ignoring it “WHY is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?” America’s cerebral president betrayed a rare flash of frustration on April 28th when dealing with a question in Asia about his country’s “weakness”. Barack Obama said…
For Chinese men there’s no status symbol like a mistress, or two, or three, or four A friend attended a work-related banquet in China recently. Seated at the same table were several men who were executives of Chinese state-owned enterprises. As bottles of Hennessy Cognac and jet-fuel-like baijiu were opened and quickly consumed, the topic…