It’s never a good sign for a country’s leader when fluctuations in the value of the national currency become a dominant concern for everyday people. That is the case today in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a huge gamble with his monetary policy, setting a controversial interest rate policy that runs contrary to firmly established economic theory and has caused the local currency, the lira, to nosedive. Slashing the value of savings, spooking investors and further fueling inflation, the policy is already causing significant hardships for the Turkish people, who polls show have lost faith in the [...]
Next week, U.S. President Joe Biden will convene his Global Summit for Democracy, a virtual gathering of global leaders that aims to promote human rights, counter corruption and discuss ways to strengthen democracy against a rising tide of authoritarianism across the world. The event fulfils a campaign promise made by then-candidate Biden to organize a summit of democracies during his first year in office. The gathering has been dismissed in some quarters as a hollow performative exercise, rendered meaningless by the inevitable controversy over the guest list. But arguments about the substance of the summit, as well as which countries were [...]
Tensions within NATO over the past two decades have led some to assert that the old military alliances of the 20th century are a thing of the past. Soon, the argument goes, they will give way to looser, ad hoc groupings like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States; the AUKUS security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States; or other “coalitions of the willing” formed to address specific concerns, like those that intervened in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. To be sure, the past 30 years have punched some [...]
