In The News

Foreign Policy: Erdoğan’s International Network of Muslim Cleric Spies

Paul Hockenos March 29, 2017
A diplomatic incident involving Germany and the Netherlands on one side and Turkey on the other revealed deep fault lines between Turkish immigrants and the nations where they reside. Members of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, wanted to campaign in the two countries for a constitutional referendum transforming Turkey’s parliamentary system into a...

CNBC: The Costs of Dumping Obama’s Clean Power Plan

Jason Bordoff March 29, 2017
Despite polarization among US lawmakers, the president can accomplish much with executive orders. Donald Trump is dismantling his predecessor’s climate legacy, explains Jason Bordoff, a professor and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Orders announced today “direct agencies to rewrite regulation...

Reuters: US, Britain, France, Others Skip Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty Talks

Michelle Nichols March 28, 2017
About 40 countries are declining to join UN talks for a nuclear weapons ban treaty and remain committed to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in force since 1970. A French ambassador argued that global security conditions are not right for such a ban, and the US ambassador to the UN questioned if anyone believed that rogue nations like North Korea would agree to such a ban. “The Trump administration...

Resurgent Russia Joins Great Game in South Asia

Harsh V Pant March 28, 2017
With joint military exercises, weapons sales and multilateral conferences, Russia is reclaiming a role as a key powerhouse in Central and South Asia that it held during the Cold War. With a more isolationist administration in Washington, Moscow is also joining with China to fill a power vacuum in South Asia. “In recent years India has grown concerned about Russia’s growing closeness to China and...

Project Syndicate: Where Has All the Water Gone?

Yasmin Siddiqi March 24, 2017
Water is a limited resource for a global population that has tripled over the last 60 years. In an essay for Project Syndicate, Yasmin Siddiqi of the Asian Development Bank focuses subterranean aquifers that store water underground and supply about 30 percent of the world’s liquid freshwater, but many of these ancient sources cannot quickly be replenished. “Surface water resources, such as...

Spiegel Online: Eight Myths of Migration

Hein de Haas March 23, 2017
Migration continues to top political agendas, but a failure to understand the phenomenon will cause new problems. Fear of an “uncontrollable influx…. has fueled the rise of extreme nationalist parties,” explains Hein de Haas for Spiegel Online. The professor of sociology refutes myths of migration. Migration is circulatory; closed borders do not automatically lead to less migration and actually...

The Wall Street Journal: A President’s Credibility

March 23, 2017
Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked with a series of claims, including a suggestion that British intelligence officials assisted former President Barack Obama in spying on Trump Tower. A Wall Street Journal editorial describes “the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other...