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Continental Drift: Europe’s Breakaways
“Happy families are all alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina The opening to Tolstoy’s great novel of love and tragedy could be a metaphor for Europe today,...
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Will Sanctions Sideline the US Dollar?
The use of sanctions as an international cudgel has long been complicated by some nasty unintended consequences. For the United States and the world economy, one consequence could be particularly...
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The Big Chill: Tensions in the Arctic
One hundred and sixty-eight years ago this past July, two British warships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—sailed north into Baffin Bay, bound on a mission to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage between...
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The Greek Earthquake
Almost before the votes were counted in the recent Greek elections, battle lines were being drawn all over Europe. While Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected prime minister from Greece’s victorious Syriza...
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Turning the European Debt Myth Upside-Down
Myths are dangerous because they rely more on cultural memory and prejudice than facts. And behind the current crisis between Greece and the European Union (EU) lies a fable that bears little...
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Yemen’s War Is Redrawing the Middle East’s Fault Lines
Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world, bereft of resources, fractured by tribal divisions and religious sectarianism, and plagued by civil war. And yet this small country tucked into the...
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Judgment Day for Austerity in Irish Election
What looked like a smooth path to electoral victory for the Irish government has suddenly turned rocky, and the Fine Gael-Labour coalition is scrambling to keep its majority in the 166-seat Dáil. A...
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Irish Shillelagh Austerity
Note: A shillelagh is a blackthorn walking stick that the Irish use for whacking things they don’t like. If there is one thing clear after Ireland’s recent election, it is that people no longer buy...
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Socialists Rain on Spain
The effort by Pedro Sanchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, to form a government on March 2 brings to mind the story of the hunter who goes into the forest with one bullet in his rifle....
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A Terrible Beauty: Remembering Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rebellion
Standing on the front steps of Dublin’s general post office a century ago, the poet Padraig Pearse announced the Poblacht na hEireann—the “Irish republic.” He was reading from a proclamation, the ink...
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