It looks like the EU is grasping for a longer baguette in the knife fight over Ukraine, suggesting that the EU might one day consider letting Ukraine into the fold.

Happy Tuesday from the AI staff! Here’s what we’ve been mulling over this week:1. “Jesus is poisonwood.”2. One if by land, two if by drone.3. Are faculty too quick to “blame the administrators”? (H/T Megan McArdle)4. Penguins, Hindus and egg-throwers.5. Scientific progress: On one hand and on the other hand.6. Honey, while you’re out, could you pick me up […]

Marco Rubio has been pushing a series of higher-ed reforms as the 2016 buzz begins to build. Could this become a hot issue in the campaign?

In a major shift for U.S. policy toward India, the American Ambassador will meet Narendra Modi, the controversial Indian politician who is the current favorite for Prime Minister in this year’s elections. Seems like the State Department is considering “Prime Minister Modi” a real possibility.

If Obamacare is not settled law, but continually in the process of being settled, it will become harder for the law’s proponents to treat any attempts to change it as affronts to some untouchable consensus.

While U.S. and EU diplomats quarrel over niceties in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is surreptitiously gaining hold on countries ever farther west. A deal approved in Hungary’s parliament last week makes it quite clear that Putin wishes to drape an invisible curtain across the European continent, imposing energy and economic dependence on those countries that fall under it. How western leaders respond to his challenge will be an important gut check.

Yesterday, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman announced that America would be challenging India’s protectionist solar energy trade policies. It’s hard to play nice when it comes to solar energy.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan identified the latest conspirators that are out to sabotage his government: pornographers. The pro-government newspaper accused ‘porn lobby’ of instigating the violent protests in the wake of a new law that aims to control content on the internet.

In voting to restrict immigration, the Swiss joined a larger, Europe-wide trend of national electorates rejecting the EU, rebelling against the political establishment, and asserting their mastery over their own national fate. EU member states can’t hold similar referenda on the free movement of peoples within the Eurozone, of course. But what if they could?

It has been in vogue lately to compare China’s rise and its relations with other world powers to the relationships between Germany and Great Britain in the years preceding The Great War. Others counter with rival historical analogies. But debating specifics of these comparisons risks losing sight of a broader point about great power politics.