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Category: Foreign Policy

It’s Economic Strategy, Stupid

America’s international economic policy is in crisis. For decades, policymakers believed that liberalizing international trade would be a rising tide that lifted all boats. While some might lose out from competition with foreign trade in the short run, the economy would grow in ways that would allow those people to adapt and adjust, ultimately finding…

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What Another Irish Housing Bubble Says about the EU Technocracy

On January 20, the Financial Times reported that the European Central Bank (ECB) would start the process of hiring its new chief economist. At the top of the list, the article said, was Irish central bank governor Philip Lane. The article noted that Lane is popular among European diplomats and is a key ally of…

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In Defense of the Nation

Observe “the splendors of history,” wrote an anonymous German pamphleteer in 1795, “and you will see that national states have rarely experienced total annihilation, while political bodies composed of several portions of different nations, have suffered endless vicissitudes.” Viewed from Jerusalem, where Yoram Hazony lives…

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The World Nationalism Made

The great and good of the Western world are alarmed. Nationalism, they say—rising from the primeval depths of biological human nature, untouched by the civilizing influences of History whose telos is global democracy—undermines the achievements of enlightened humanity. It poses an inherent threat to just societies—those based on the universal values of freedom, equality, and…

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Containing the Drug Cartels

The U.S.-Mexico border is a brutal, two-thousand-mile stretch, forbidding in its arid climate and its varied but austere landscape. It demarcates two disparate economies and ways of life, and it is the site of immense trade and exchange between them. Following Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, intense controversies have flared…

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Mexico’s Postmodern Populism

On June 27, 2018, five days before the federal elections in Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) addressed thousands of his followers at the flagship Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. As he was outlining the main features of his future government, his supporters were chanting the chorus of the day, “It’s an honor supporting Obrador.”  …

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Sweden’s Ambivalence on Immigration

In 2015, immigration to Sweden reached an all-time high. At its peak, more than 10,000 people arrived in a single week. The total for the entire year was 162,877 people—1.6 percent of the Swedish population. In September, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven welcomed the immigrants, saying that his Europe does not build walls. A month and…

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Poland at 100 Years of Independence

The hundredth anniversary of the reclamation of Polish independence is cause to celebrate. Poles will celebrate. Yet national and international responses will also be colored by the nation’s recent political controversies, and the tensions of international liberalism. I suspect…

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Reconstruction and the End of History

The years between 1865 and 1877 form the period in American history known as Reconstruction—reconstruction, in this case, meaning the rebuilding of the federal Union which had been dis­rupted by the attempt of eleven Southern states to secede from that Union in order to protect legalized slavery. It might have been a new era of…

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Confucianism and Meritocracy: Light from the East

Ex oriente lux. With the spring academic term finished, I am in Japan and China, ostensibly to give papers at several Japanese and Chinese universities, but really to learn more about meritocracy debates in contemporary Asia. There has been a heated debate going on there among political theorists about the forms of governance most consistent with ancient Confucian political thought. The debate tracks the theoretical shadowboxing Confucian scholars have been doing for the last two…

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