WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is a strange standard-bearer for Republicans. He espouses few of the party’s traditional positions and disavows most of its icons. Almost every important conservative publication — National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary — opposes him, as do most leading conservative pundits, from George Will to David Brooks to Bret Stephens. Of […]

NEW YORK — It was the annual gathering of world leaders in New York this past week, and for most of them, it’s time for group therapy. Around the globe, leaders of all stripes seem afflicted with the same malady: low approval ratings. Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has pointed out that the median approval rating […]

NEW YORK — Whether you put them in a basket or not, the question of this election is — who are Donald Trump’s supporters? One way to answer is to widen its scope beyond the United States. Trump is part of a broad populist trend running across the Western world. Over the past few decades, […]

NEW YORK — On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was driving on the Long Island Expressway, heading out to a friend’s house to spend a few weeks working on a book. An hour into my drive, I switched from music to news and listened with horror to reports that two large passenger planes […]

As we are all consumed with the ups and downs on this bizarre campaign, President Barack Obama will make his last trip to Asia. The direct purpose of his trip to China is to attend a meeting of the G-20, but it is perhaps more importantly to breathe life into one of his big ideas […]

NEW YORK — In recent days, I have had a dream: that America has a real Republican Party, a party offering a serious right-of-center alternative to the Democrats. Such a contest of ideas would improve the public debate and offer Americans a real choice, not the cartoon campaign we have today. Donald Trump had the […]

NEW YORK — I came to America in 1982, attracted to the country and interested in its politics. Those were days of economic trauma (a deep recession) and national security fears. And I came from India, where the conventional wisdom was quasi-socialist and anti-American. Still, I found myself fascinated by Ronald Reagan and his Republican […]

NEW YORK — Through the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this past week. The Republican convention has been colorful and […]

NEW YORK — It has become conventional wisdom to note that Barack Obama has failed in his efforts to extricate America from military conflicts in the Middle East. Having promised to end these wars, he has in the last year expanded American interventions in Iraq, Syria and other countries. The troop drawdown in Afghanistan has […]

WASHINGTON — If Tony Blair is remembered in history only for his support of the Iraq War, that will be a tragedy. The former British prime minister was one of his generation’s most important political leaders, bringing the left out of the wilderness and reshaping it for the post-Cold War world. He remains remarkably prescient […]