Politics & Economics

Despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or contempt, a majority of people have a clear understanding of what Nigel Farage stands...

The enduring liberal fantasy that Melania Trump is unwilling, trapped, in need of rescue, #FreeMelania, has never squared with the most rigorous reporting about her. Gestures that commentators read during...

As a Polish émigré and fervent Polish nationalist, Zbigniew Brzezinski focused most of his fear on the Soviet Union. A visceral hostility to the USSR became the driving force behind his career as a policy...

Why​ did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such influence over Labour? Peter Mandelson tended his own mythology and influence over the...

Călin Georgescu’s entire political programme, in so far as he has one, is based on the need to heal Romania by creating – or, as he portrays it, restoring – a synthetic medieval country, agrarian,...

Ideological exclusion at the border seems anachronistic now, when all human knowledge is accessible online, video-conferencing software is installed on every laptop, and ideas and information can be shared...

It was -10ºC outside and only 10ºC in Yulia’s flat, but she told me this was a good day: the radiators weren’t stone cold. Engineers had reconnected the building to the district heating network,...

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The wars in Indochina gave the US heroin epidemics; Latin America, a plague of powder...

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi Sanae will focus on the immediate economic challenges facing Japan: high taxes, inflation, low wages and the cost of living....

Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long...

As the journalist Dom Phillips came to see it, the deforestation of the Amazon was the work of a stupendously profitable interlocking network of corporate and political actors. ‘You don’t have to look...

In a country plagued by corruption, China’s national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections, but they are also...

Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense...

The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Marco Rubio has stuck especially closely...

Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was...

China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi Jinping a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American...

Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the...

Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate...