France’s Le Monde newspaper gets a story that has somehow eluded the US press:  India and Japan are steadily deepening their relationship.  The story (unfortunately written in French, a bad habit the Parisian press seems for some reason unwilling to change) is huge: “Votre voisin est votre ennemi naturel et le voisin de votre voisin […]

For many Americans, the big story Sunday evening was the New York Giants’ victory over the New England Patriots and Eli Manning’s coronation as one of the NFL’s elite quarterbacks. But for Via Meadia, the real news broke before the game, during Matt Lauer’s interview with President Obama. Asked about the Iranian threat and Israel’s […]

With British-Argentine tensions escalating in the South Atlantic over the barren Falkland Islands, many observers, Via Meadia included, have predicted a similar confrontation over Gibraltar, Britain’s other controversial possession. Now this very scenario appears to be playing out, as Gibraltar’s new Chief Minister had scarcely ascended to his chair when Spain intensified its claim to […]

First the mullahs bailed on their threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. Now they’ve walked back their promise to boycott the European Union in response to its oil embargo. Writes the Financial Times (subscription required): Rostam Ghasemi, Iran’s oil minister, on Saturday said that any cut-off in Iranian oil supplies would target “hostile states” […]

The great voices of history are often said to echo down through the generations. But as the New York Times reports, sometimes those voices are more than just a metaphor: Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax […]

Via NPR strategy whiz Andy Carvin come some remarkable prep notes written for Bashar Assad before his December interview with Barbara Walters. Excerpts: It is hugely important and worth mentioning that “mistakes” have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized “police force”. American Psyche can be easily […]

I have, to put it mildly, been somewhat astonished at the heated reaction that my blog post “Do Institutions Matter?” has provoked, culminating in a letter from the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, to The American Interest complaining about my piece and contesting various points in it. I’m now one of the few […]

If Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were an American college president, he’d be fighting for his life right now.  Said Sergei, according to Reuters: “Some of the voices heard in the West with evaluations of the results of the vote in the U.N. Security Council on the Syria resolution sound, I would say, improper, somewhere […]

New debt figures from Europe are encouraging, for a change. Greek debt is up, and so are debt levels in Portugal, Ireland and Spain.But in Italy, as in the eurozone as a whole, debt edged down in the third quarter of last year.If this trend continues, and Italy continues to widen the distance between itself […]

China has passed a law banning Chinese airlines from complying with an EU directive to buy carbon permits to offset CO2 generated on passenger and cargo flights to and from EU destinations.  It’s the strongest step yet in global resistance to the EU requirement, which India, the US and most other countries around the world […]