Imtiaz A Hussain

To any question whether the US president and commander-in-chief is working against the country, Donald J Trump's tenure already supplied an overwhelming positive answer, even before he dramatised them all in Finland during mid-July 2018. We just preferred to look away.

Henry Luce deserves more than the credit he gets for predicting the “American Century” (in Life magazine, February 1941). That was after the League of Nations was unceremoniously buried, but before both the Pearl Harbor bombings, which awakened a slumberous and isolationist United States (that is but a slight exaggeration...

Ian Fleming's trademark narrative has returned: Russia playing the same old game he wrote so much about (if one remembers James Bond, his boss, M, and their Soviet obsession).

Every time Donald J Trump berates Canada, the friendliest neighbour any country could have, those Gerry Rafferty/Joe Egan lyrics from a Stealer's Wheel song rings through my mind.

Homo sapiens could not have faced the erosion of their cutting-edge claims at a worse time.

Puff was a mythological dragon, made famous by one of the original, 1960s, folk-rock bands, consisting of Peter, Paul, and Mary. He lived “by the sea”, and would “frolic in the autumn mist” in a land they called Honah Lee.

As one of the most widely watched human activity, soccer's World Cup Championship unleashes raw competition between countries, raising emotions that cover almost every stripe we know and triggering nationalism of even a guttural kind.

Democracy is, by far, the most acclaimed historical form of government. It not only allows representation of all groups, but also permits every adult to exercise complete sovereignty at the polling booth. There might be nuances and variances here or there, particularly in the preceding campaigns and subsequent outcomes, but we have, by and large, managed to live with our differences, converse with adversaries, and bite the bullet so democracy strengthens itself.

Gideon Rose made an astute observation in editing the May/June 2018 Foreign Affairs cover story on the current “democratic regression”. “We have seen this movie before,” he quoted a Latin friend of his on the concurrent predicament, “just never in English.”

Henry Kissinger did not mince his words. As one of the most erudite commentators of global power rivalry, he was truly jolted to see the computer game, Go, a prototype of the more mesmerising AlphaGo game, capable of making strategic decisions far faster than human beings, and predicting the winner more accurately.

Future historians might find it far easier navigating through this post-Cold War era to explain the Muslim predicament. Since 1990 or so, one sturdy Muslim state after another has bitten the bullet, to put it bluntly, devastated for good: Iraq, twice over (1991 with Operation Desert Storm for invading Kuwait, then the 2003 war for allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction); Libya, simply because of the dramatic collapse of one person, Muammar

Donald J Trump's foreign policy weltanschauung may be better understood perceptually and through his personal relations than its claim to be practical and pragmatic. This seems to be the message from a purview of four of his policy pursuits: rebalancing trade with China, clipping Iran's wings, anchoring a bold Middle East policy approach upon recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and denuclearising North Korea. They do add up, and there may be something beyond a simple sum of all the parts, but constructing and construing them from unfolding events can also breed confusion.

With 2018 being the first functional year of Donald Trump's foreign policy paradigm, a pattern seems to be emerging: brinkmanship as the starting point, as much to contrast his approach to his predecessor(s) as to reaffirm the relative strength of the United States that even US citizens were beginning to seriously doubt.

It was just what the increasingly divided world needed, a cementing force: Meghan Markle to sparkle the audience, and Prince Harry to carry the tone and torch of his mother, the “People's Princess”. Behind Bishop Michael Curry's fiery speech, it seems Michael Jackson's “We are the world” carried the Windsor wedding as a silent uninvited guest.

EM Forster, almost a lone-wolf democracy crusader between the two world wars, confronted as unpalatable a European playground as many African, Asian, and Latin American countries striving to convince others of their democratic claims face today: an uphill battle in which the institutionalised forces against democracy, such as extreme rightists/leftists and militarism, were usually at least as strong as those

US President Donald J Trump did not mince his words: President Harry S Truman, a Democrat, made the United States the first country to recognise Israel's statehood (May 14, 1948), yet his own December 6, 2017 decision to shift the US embassy to Jerusalem, the first country to do so, on May 14, 2018, may have converted the logical 1948 recognition decision into a 2018 conflict invitation.

FEW, if any, people/philosophers get as bashed up on their 200th birthday anniversary as Karl Heinrich Marx did on May 5, 2018. Whether it is the neo-liberal atmosphere or a guttural reaction to his opposition to private property rights, this German philosopher's 21st Century portrait as a punching bag is woefully deficient.

Behind the brouhaha of the recent Macron-Trump and Moon-Kim summits, the Modi-Jinping rendezvous may have made less noise, but could make more substantive global changes. A multi-layered appraisal at the local, regional, and global levels examines the proposition.

If 2018 was meant to be the year of the “moon”, we have not been disappointed. There was the March 31 Blue Moon, that is, when the full moon appears for the second time in a month.

The British Commonw-ealth Heads of Government Meeting (BCHOGM) unfolding in London this week faces some underlying questions: What is it that binds 53 disparate members? How does it blend into 21st Century international relations? Why is it important?