With a little less than six weeks before hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi is inaugurated as the new President of Iran, President Biden’s top aides are engaged in a high stakes game of ‘telephone’ in Vienna. As Iranian negotiators refuse to meet their American counterparts in person, European intermediaries have shuttled between hotel rooms with messages...
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Edmund Burke observed. At the turn of the twentieth century, both France and Germany were wooing Great Britain as an ally against the other. Why was it France, Britain’s nemesis for centuries, which succeeded in gaining British friendship? The answer is complex, but a large part...
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...
