Commentary

As Israel prepares for its second election this year, there is one party that deserves extra attention—despite its relatively small size. Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) is a secular party; its leadership and platform are rooted in the ideology of...

In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong once again plunged into political crisis over a legal issue. Veteran observers across a wide political spectrum characterized it as the worst such episode in Hong Kong in many decades. ...

Eighty years ago, Adolf Hitler’s war erupted. On September 1, 1939, the Nazi tyrant unleashed a lightning campaign to crush Poland. In destroying Poland, Hitler had the assistance of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, with whom he had made...

What many initially treated as a joke may cause a rift in U.S.-Denmark relations. President Donald Trump’s peculiar offer to buy Greenland from Denmark has caused an unexpected controversy. Trump showed that the news report was no joke when...

Dainius Vaičekonis was a university student in 1989 when he got in a taxi on Aug. 23 to drive through heavy traffic to the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a day that would change his life, and the...

People seem attracted to anniversaries, including literary ones. That’s because they’re “shiny”: artificial but sometimes usefully attention grabbing. I’ve an anniversary celebration to note that comes with a contemporary gloss, to be polished up below. ...

The recent Moscow protests have been seen as yet another turning point in anti-Putin oppositional politics. Nearly every individual who lives in the post-Soviet space can’t help but feel a personal connection to this story. Every new issue, every...

The Volodymyr Zelensky surge continued on July 21 when the Ukrainian president’s newly created Servant of the People (SoP) Party won the first outright parliamentary majority in the country’s post-Soviet history. Given that the party’s candidate list was a...

Facing the existential threat of the then-rapidly expanding Islamic State in 2014, former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki officially established the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) to assist in the defense of Iraq. Ayatollah Sistani, a prominent Shia cleric, called...

What happened on 8 August at Russia’s Severodvinsk Naval Testing Range? That question has preoccupied Western media reports for several days running. This New York Times report is typical:...