MELBOURNE  —  Australia continues to be a source of bemused fascination to students of Western parliamentary democracy.

For students of incomprehensible behaviour by otherwise apparently intelligent leaders, Australian politics is the gift that keeps on giving.The latest example is the decision by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government, just re-elected by a razor-thin margin, to deny former

Bad news is all around us.The world confronts the possibility of a sexist, racist ignoramus occupying the White House next January.Unreconstructed authoritarians already are in charge in Russia and China.Populists of varying ugliness are winning elections from Poland to the Phili

One of the most bizarre arguments made by the people who support Britain’s exit from the European Union is the notion that a self-exiled UK will find a new global relevance, and indeed leadership role, as the centre of the “Anglosphere”.The idea is that there are a group of count

Can anything more be done to stop jobless, hopeless, rootless and alienated young Muslim men, in the Islamic world and in the West, from embracing violent Islamism?Curbing the flow of recruits will not, of course, eradicate groups like Daesh.

One of the many things the world has learned from the Iran nuclear saga is that its leaders made a mistake when negotiating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1960s, in not doing anything to constrain uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing.This failure appar

The only thing to lament about the agreement reached by Iran and the P5+1 (the UN Security Council’s five permanent members — China, Britain, France, Russia, and the United States — plus Germany) in Vienna this month is that it was not signed and sealed a decade ago.

The famously beautiful Indiana University campus, where I have been teaching a summer course for the new School of Global and International Studies, is now almost deserted.Most of its students, like their counterparts across the northern developed world, are taking these next mon

The shocking thing about nuclear weapons is that they seem to have lost their power to shock. While the nuclear deal that was just reached with Iran in Lausanne might suggest otherwise and is very good news, that effort should not obscure the bad news elsewhere. The momentum to