Frances Martel, Breitbart
In a private fundraiser speech made public in today's release of hacked Wikileaks emails, former president Bill Clinton referred to the country of Lebanon as a positive example in the world. Lebanon, he argued, was âÂÂhanging on against all the oddsâ because it is a âÂÂmore tolerantâ society than many of its neighbors.
Robert Fisk, Independent
Maybe it's because I live in Lebanon, and return to Beirut from Aleppo and Damascus, that the place seems so "normal."
Ishaan Tharoor & Laris Karklis, Washington Post
For a thousand years, Mosul has been at the heart of battles that shaped the Middle East.
Irfan Aktan, Al-Monitor
Press freedom in Turkey is often assessed on the basis of jailed journalists, but this fails to fully reflect the gravity of the situation if one omits the huge number of journalists who have lost their jobs and are facing an uncertain future and struggling to survive.
Fintan O'Toole, IT
Just when relations between Ireland and Britain had reached an unprecedented equilibrium, Brexit makes everything deeply unsettled again.
Rajan Menon, National Interest
Cold WarâÂÂera Asia was a dangerous and often bloody place. But its alignments were predictable and its problems readily identifiable. No longer.
Lennox Samuels, The Daily Beast
Philippine President Duterte says he's severing ties to Washington, and ready to be dependent on Beijing -- which won't be criticizing his increasingly bloody rule.
Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest
The Philippine pivot to China is just the latest consequence of Obama's feckless foreign policy.
Mike Giglio, BuzzFeed
The long-awaited battle to capture ISIS's most important city is finally underway. Mike Giglio reports from the front line in northern Iraq.
Per Urlaub, The Conversation
While Green Party candidates win elections and make policy in Germany, here the Green Party barely registers. Why? Contrasting electoral systems, and the fact that U.S. Greens run as purists, not as politicians.
Seth Harp, Narratively
I can't stop thinking about whether any of my bullets ever took out a civilian. In the murky world of modern warfare, I'm far from the only one.
Michael Cecire, Foreign Affairs
Georgia can certainly be called a democracy; it is home to a relatively open and competitive political and electoral environment. Yet whether the country's democracy is a liberal one is less of a settled matter.
Max Boot, Foreign Policy
With the Philippine president ditching Washington for Beijing, the contest to control the South China Sea just got a lot more complicated.
Charlie Winter, The Atlantic
It's all part of God's plan.
Polly Toynbee, Guardian
Britons have started to realise that a protest vote against immigration might have economic ramifications too. The prime minister knows she can change her mind too
Ian Johnson, New York Review of Books
Of all the books on the Cultural Revolution that have appeared during this anniversary year, I was most intrigued by those that told detailed local stories to illustrate the larger history.
Michael Crowley, Politico
The GOP nominee's insistence that "our country has no idea" who hacked election targets follows numerous instances of resisting findings that implicate the Russian leader.
Colby Cosh, National Post
The province that voted PC 12 elections in a row did not suddenly disappear overnight.
Fabrice Balanche, Washington Institute
The strategically important Syrian Druze will not be won over unless they are cut off from Damascus, and even then they would need concrete assurances that international forces will protect them from hostile jihadists.
Ofra Bengio, The American Interest
Will the Kurds' proxy fight against ISIS work against their national aspirations in the long run?
Nick Danforth, War on the Rocks
By refusing to intervene more decisively in Syria, President Barack Obama claimed to have finally broken with the âÂÂWashington playbookâ â his term for the
