James Forsyth, Spectator
The government is adopting the South Korean approach.
Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg View
Italians and other Europeans are eager for Germany to take responsibility for the EU and share their financial burden. Even if it could, it wouldn’t.
Andrew Ehrhardt, War on the Rocks
What began in a market in Wuhan, China, has spread as far afield as the Faroe Islands, and in response, a practice that began in a medieval republic on the Adriatic Sea is now official policy across much of the globe. Despite its boundless tendencies, the novel coronavirus has triggered a response from states that is largely protectionist, and reliant on a “batten down the hatches” approach to stem the spread. The measures have led some
Sebastian Hoppe, Riddle
The Russian Far East (RFE) is supposed to play a decisive role in what has been labelled the country’s Pivot to the East (povorot na Vostok). The pivot gained traction among the policy-making elite in Moscow after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But there had been earlier moves in a similar direction. The global financial crisis of 2008 spurred various initiatives designed to strengthen both the development of the...
Rym Momtaz et al, Politico EU
Despite criticism, China keeps up PR and diplomatic offensive over coronavirus.
Ed Yong, The Atlantic
A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.
Michael Klare, TomDispatch
Nico Johnson, TAC
The Canadian PM is coddling the Communist Party at the worst possible time, further eroding his own authority.
Ram Madhav, Indian Express
Meghan O'Sullivan, Bloomberg
From Russia to Mexico, U.S. foreign policy makers face new risks and opportunities.
Alexander Trushin, Worldcrunch
The imposition of quarantine and self-isolation has hit migrant workers hardest of all. They have nothing to live on in Russia but have no way of returning home.
Jacqueline Rose, London Review of Books
ver since the arrival of Covid-19 – in Western Europe, roughly at the end of January – sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, have increased exponentially, an upsurge strangely in line with the graphs that daily chart the toll of the sick and the dead. By the end of March, monthly sales of the UK Penguin Classics edition had grown from the low hundreds to the...
The Star
We all knew this was going to be a long, hard struggle. Based on the Ontario government’s latest guidance on how the province may be able to return to some kind of public life, it’s now clear it will be even longer and harder than many of us thought.
Paul Wells, Maclean's
The plans that premiers Legault and Ford released on Monday were road maps and not timetables—and there are good reasons why
Mads Curtis Gravesen, Evening Standard
After two and a half months of public life dominated by Covid-19, Danes are eager to restart their old lives. Denmark has managed to keep the virus from overwhelming the health service, and generally people supported the measures, but the discussion is...
Mark Galeotti, Berlin Policy Journal
It’s tempting to see a nefarious and belligerent Russia behind every threat. But has the West created a convenient bogey man?
Brands, Feaver & Inboden, FA
The foreign policy establishment is not a closed cabal, American statecraft has not been a giant failure, and scrapping professionalism for amateurism would be a disaster. In truth, the foreign policy establishment is an American strengthrather than weakness. It is more open-minded and accountable than its critics allow. It acts as a storehouse of accumulated professional wisdom, providing intellectual ballast to the ship of state. On...
