If you like betting on embattled underdogs, President Tsai Ing-wen is worth a look. She’s tempting the wrath of her powerful neighbor in mainland China by arguing that Taiwan must maintain its own open culture, democratic values and, yes, its sovereignty. Tsai is a petite woman, dressed in a plain black suit, who speaks the careful language of a Cornell-educated lawyer. But her low-key message of self-determination makes her something of a rebel in an Asia where China’s autocratic President Xi J

When Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, he didn’t know he was walking into a killing zone. He had become the prime target in a 21st century information war -- one that involved hacking, kidnapping and ultimately murder -- waged by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his courtiers against dissenters.How did a battle of ideas, triggered by Khashoggi’s outspoken journalism for the Washington Post, become so deadly? That’s the riddle at the center of the column

Listen to the voice barking orders on a Russian ship last Sunday as it drove straight toward a Ukrainian tug: “Crush him from the right. ... Do it! Do it! (Expletive) cut him off!” And then, just before the deliberate collision, a satisfied: “Hold on, everyone.” What you sense is the raw exuberance of Russian power, in the audio and video recordings released by the Ukrainian interior minister and posted on YouTube by BBC News. The Russian captain snarls obscene, bellicose orders to his crew -- c

If President Trump is the dealmaker he claims to be, he should use the upcoming G20 summit in Buenos Aires to declare a win in his trade war with China -- before his bombast does any more damage to the global economy.Trade is Trump’s signature issue. But more than a year after he began threatening tariffs on major trading partners, he has relatively little to show for it. The improvements in NAFTA are modest, at best. The US economy hasn’t suffered significantly, but global growth is beginning t

Here‘s a simple four-word wish for Thanksgiving 2018 -- a day when most of us take a break from the blurring, dizzying speed of our internet world: Let’s slow things down.I don‘t just mean stopping to smell the roses, or taking a hike in the woods, or hiding our screens for a few hours. I mean, literally: Slow down the circuits. Put more friction in the system. Make social media slower, more local and less instantly connected to people we don’t know. Our hyper-fast world has become destructive.

While the bombastic US-China “trade war” has been getting the headlines, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been waging a quieter battle to combat Chinese theft of trade secrets from American companies -- a practice so widespread that even China trade boosters regard it as egregious. The Trump administration’s much-ballyhooed campaign of tariffs will eventually produce some version of a truce -- economists say that any other result would amount to a mutual suicide pact. But the ba

One of the assumptions that economists sometimes use to frame their models is to specify that some variables will be held constant, a concept that’s expressed with the Latin phrase “ceteris paribus.” We often make the same mistake in politics and foreign policy. We concentrate on our own domestic issues and assume that the rest of the world will remain fixed while we sort them out. We’ll get back to you later, in 2021, say. But the world moves on. It’s dynamic, not static: Erratic changes in one

What would the ghosts of 1918 -- not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward -- tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? America just finished a snarling, bitterly divisive election, and we’re all puzzling over how to interpret the results. President Trump, meanwhile, headed for Paris last weekend to commemorate the armistice of what historian Margaret MacMillan has ca

A conference here to gather American business and military experts to discuss the coming revolution in artificial intelligence was a good Election Day measure of the challenges ahead to maintain the US competitive edge. Corporate and government leaders agree that China’s rapid application of AI to business and military problems should be a “Sputnik moment” to propel change in America. As a top-down command economy, China is directing money and its best brains to develop the smart systems that wi

When President Trump issues an election-time order to send up to 15,000 troops to confront what many experts say is a non-existent threat on the US-Mexico border, what should Defense Secretary Jim Mattis do about it?Mattis’ answer, so far, has been to support the president and mostly keep his mouth shut. He gruffly batted back a reporter’s question Wednesday about whether Trump’s troop deployment order was a political stunt by saying, “We don’t do stunts in this department.” Unfortunately, some

From a distance, the Tree of Life Synagogue now looks like another American crime scene. Police tape blocks off the Wilkins Avenue entrance of the temple, and patrol cars guard the perimeter with flashing lights.But just at the yellow-tape barrier, the closest spot to the horror of what happened here Saturday, people have left hundreds of bouquets of flowers, cards and posters with a repeated message: We come in grief and solidarity; we speak for a community that will resist the hatred that kill

One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy -- the black hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries -- does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU. What’s fascinating about the GRU revelations is that they seem to reflect an aggressive pushback after several years in which Putin (chiefly through the GRU) launched recklessly aggressive co

George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a British newspaper in the mid-1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same insistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at the Washington Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.I have known

President Donald Trump seems convinced that he has found the formula for success in foreign policy: Bully your adversaries, sanction them, squeeze them -- and then flatter them and make a deal. Trump followed this approach with North Korea and he got a showy summit meeting in Singapore in June with Kim Jong-un and a pledge -- encouraging but so far undelivered -- for denuclearization. He adopted the hard-talk/sweet-talk tactics with Mexico and, eventually, after a long pout, with Canada, and he

Reading Greg Miller’s gripping new account of President Trump’s entanglement in the Russia investigation, it’s striking just how many of the president’s difficulties have been self-created. Trump sees enemies everywhere around him; he should look in the mirror. As the book’s ironic title makes clear, Trump has been “The Apprentice” in the White House. New to government, buoyed by sycophantic supporters and his own overweening ego, Trump made mistake after mistake: He turned little problems into

America watched three searing versions of reality television this week. They all demonstrated that under the glare of the lights and the stress of questioning, character reveals itself. Christine Blasey Ford was a startlingly powerful witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, in part because she had been unknown to most Americans before the cameras started rolling. Her answers were clear and concise. She described what she remembered from 36 years ago, and what she didn’t. She n

This month commemorates two pinnacles for the benign, naive superpower that was America, both involving our now-lost role as Middle East peacemaker. Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt; and 25 years ago, President Bill Clinton presided over the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestinians. As we looked this week at the old photographs of beaming American presidents grandly mediating between adversaries, what was happe

The public conversation this past week was dominated by a book about a man who is obsessed with winning, President Trump. Too little attention was given to a book about someone who illustrates the benefits of losing, former Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry’s memoir, “Every Day Is Extra,” was published in early September. It’s interesting less for new revelations about diplomacy or politics (there aren’t many) than for its study of a politician’s character, and how it was shaped by personal a

Only a man who is deeply worried about his own strength would talk as much as Donald Trump does about the danger of appearing weak.That’s my biggest takeaway from reading “Fear,” Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency. The scoops were mostly revealed last week. What’s fresh is Trump’s repeated, obsessive talk about weakness during his first year in office. Woodward’s recounting of Trump’s conversations is a study in character, or lack of it. The president’s vanity, pettiness and mean

This is indeed “Crazytown,” as a quote from Bob Woodward’s new book describes it, and we are watching a “nervous breakdown.” The problem is that it afflicts the country as a whole, and not just our narcissistic chief executive. President Trump has drawn America with him into “the devil’s workshop,” as Woodward quotes former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus’ description of the presidential bedroom where Trump watches cable TV and composes his late-night and early-morning tweets. These mi