Every day, the gargantuan U.S. intelligence community, with its budget of $84 billion, scans the world looking for threats to the United States. In a landmark report released last month, the National Intelligence Council identified a big one: climate change. The world’s failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the brutal impacts of climate change, the assessment warns, are now poised to upend geopolitics over the next two decades as global warming exacerbates diplomatic tensions, cross-border competition and instability in heat-stressed countries. It is hard to overstate the importance of this new report, which is the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence [...]
A graphic illustration of China’s prowess in building its national high-speed passenger rail network caused a minor sensation as it made the rounds on Twitter last week. Like a colorful time-lapse photograph, only employing bar graphs instead of, say, plant life, it showed a lively dance of nations contending for leadership in the rollout of high-speed rail, beginning in 1976. In the early years, Japan and France jousted for the crown, looking almost unassailable, only to be matched and then passed by Germany and Spain. Only well into the display, starting in 2003, did a new contender appear and then, in a [...]
President Joe Biden’s administration has come under heavy criticism, both domestically and from overseas, over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan by American and NATO forces. Since Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, Biden’s approval rating has dipped nearly five points, to 45 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average of opinion polls. And Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, bluntly criticized the U.S. earlier this week for making “very few—if any—consultations with their European partners” regarding plans for the exit from Afghanistan. The fallout from this crisis will follow Biden to United Nations headquarters in New York later [...]
