Diplomacy & Crisis News

Yanukovych's decision to snub the EU has made his job a lot harder. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have taken to the streets in support of European values, his own political base has lost trust in him, and Russia may soon decide it prefers to work with a less toxic partner. The EU might just come out of all of this a winner.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not a crazy, irrational, or reckless zealot searching for opportunities for aggression, as this sweeping intellectual profile shows. That means there’s room for the United States and Iran to improve ties—if Washington can convince Khamenei it’s not determined to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White is best known as one of the leading architects of the Bretton Woods system that shaped the global economy after World War II. But he was also a spy for the Soviet Union, providing secret information and giving advice on economic issues. Why did he do it? Newly uncovered documents show that this champion of postwar global capitalism was actually a passionate believer in the success of the Soviet experiment with socialism.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the Arab Spring, given the post-revolutionary turmoil the Middle East is now experiencing. But critics forget that it takes time for new democracies to transcend their authoritarian pasts. As the history of political development elsewhere shows, things get better.

Compared with other developed countries, the United States has very low taxes, little income redistribution, and an extraordinarily complex tax code. If it wanted to, the government could raise taxes without crippling growth or productivity. Tax reform is ultimately a political choice, not an economic one—a statement about what sort of society Americans want.