As the Dispatch recognizes, much of the discussion of cryptocurrencies is obscured by the fact that people do not understand what they are. Monetary theory tells us that currency – fiat, crypto, or otherwise – must perform as three functions: medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. As speculative assets, cryptocurrencies fall...
On the heels of a European tour intended to galvanize traditional American rivals for an era of great power competition, President Joe Biden yesterday arrived in Geneva – “the city of peace” – for a much-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. News conferences for both leaders followed the formal meeting — the contents of...
Taiwan has long been an epicenter of great power tension, perhaps most dangerously so during the early 1950s. Following his defeat by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang supporters withdrew to Taiwan, planning to regroup and return to the mainland in force. With the U.S. Navy lying athwart the...
In San Salvador on Tuesday evening, after a proposal and hard-sell by populist President Nayib Bukele, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador passed a slim three-page bill enshrining Bitcoin as a legal tender currency within the country – a designation previously held solely by the U.S. dollar. In the West, Bitcoin has been generating a...
The Arctic debate appears to present a conflict between long-term necessities and short-run priorities. In the long run, mitigating the climate crisis will necessitate multilateral cooperation, with Russia and China as integral parts. However, deterrence is the only policy that can credibly commit the U.S. to defend its Arctic interests. Abandoning the Arctic could invite...
This week, G7 finance ministers will meet in London to discuss, among other things, the Biden Administration’s proposed global minimum 15% corporate tax rate. The idea is simple (to crack down on multinationals’ tax arbitrage schemes) and comes gift-wrapped with a timely justification (to pay for pandemic-induced recovery packages). The proposal, with U.S. Treasury Secretary...
President John F. Kennedy arrived in Vienna sixty years ago with lofty expectations for a Cold War breakthrough. But rather than alleviating U.S.-Soviet tensions as Kennedy had hoped, his conference with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instead precipitated a summer of crisis in Berlin, the perennial flashpoint of the Cold War. Probing Kennedy’s resolve, Khrushchev reissued...
Last weekend, Belarus dispatched a warplane to divert and ground a commercial Ryanair flight in Minsk. After landing, authorities swiftly moved to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich, a longtime critic of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko who, in a predictable turn, defended the move as an internal matter. In response, the EU banned Belarusian flights over the...
Ahead of a diplomatic swing highlighted by an encounter with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has broadcast the Biden Administration’s concerns about the militarization of the Arctic. Against the backdrop of increased Sino-Russian cooperation in the region, united by shared economic interests in its control, Blinken has stated that the...
In October 1994, the Clinton administration had momentous news to share with the world. It had reached an agreement with North Korea to incrementally achieve normalization and denuclearization. Pyongyang pledged to freeze and dismantle its nuclear reactors, submit to international inspections and comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. promised North Korea financing for...
