RealClearWorld Articles

The European Union’s decision to fine Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act is being sold as a routine competition case. It’s not. It’s the latest front in Brussels’s campaign to regulate—and increasingly control—the digital infrastructure built and largely operated by American companies. The fine targets Google today, but the larger fight is over governance, free speech, innovation, and economic power. According to the European Commission, Google violated the DMA by favoring its own services in search results and restricting app developers...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C. this week reignited controversial demands for his arrest in response to ongoing proceedings before the International Criminal Court. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reiterated his threat to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in comments published this month as part of a New York Times news article. During the interview, Mamdani reportedly insisted, “Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do.” Although Mamdani later admitted his government “does...

This article first appeared in German in Neue Zürcher Zeitung Few medieval figures loom larger in Russia’s origin story than Yuriy Dolgorukiy, the prince credited with founding an outpost on the swampy banks of the Moskva River from which the Russian empire eventually arose. But the man Moscow claims as one of its forefathers is buried not in Russia, but in Kyiv. Dolgorukiy’s ambition was to rule Kyivan Rus from its true center – let the name be a hint. He died there as Grand Prince in 1157 and was laid to rest at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, which Russia struck on June 15,...

Now that the tenuous ceasefire between the United States and Iran has broken down and mutual strikes have resumed, Washington seems to be spiraling back into a conflict that most analysts, and the public, regard as a fateful blunder.   Some commentators have interpreted the Iran war as a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, marking the end of its military primacy. To some extent, this diagnosis actually overstates the ultimate significance of the Iran war, while understating its continuity with the United States’ failed conflicts over many decades and the lessons we should draw...

The Golden Arches Theory of diplomacy has taught that “no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever gone to war with one another.” While that theory hasn’t held 100 percent since Thomas Friedman introduced it about 30 years ago (mostly because of Vladimir Putin), the premise is basically sound: thriving economies tend to prevent shooting. This is something to keep in mind as we consider ways to reorient current relationships away from just military spending while finding other opportunities to strengthen allies. I was reminded of this last month when Israeli Prime...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is no stranger to the machinery of repression. He has throttled internet providers, monitored political opponents, and folded once-independent media into a loyalist chorus. Now he is turning to China to tighten his grip on the information space—and Washington and Brussels should take notice. Chinese telecom giants have quietly become fixtures of Turkey's digital backbone. ZTE and Huawei hold large, and in some cases controlling, stakes in Netaş, Turkcell, Türk Telekom, and Vodafone Turkey—the country's four largest carriers. China is...

Around the world, right-wing populists are mired in allegations of corruption: Donald Trump in the United States, Nigel Farage in the UK, and now Marine Le Pen in France. Although French courts recently cleared Le Pen to run in next year’s presidential election, she carries significant legal baggage. Therefore, the National Rally (RN) should seriously consider running its deputy, Jordan Bardella, instead. Last March, a court convicted Marine Le Pen of embezzling European Parliament funds. More than a year later, an appeals court upheld the conviction and sentenced her to one year of...

Outside Syria’s parliament building in Damascus, lawmakers filed past the stone façade for the chamber’s first session since Bashar al-Assad’s fall. Inside, the freshly minted lawmakers stood to take the constitutional oath as President Ahmad al-Sharaa looked on. The ceremony was carefully staged to show both Syrians and foreign observers that independent political institutions have returned after more than half a century of Assad family rule. “Syria is writing a new chapter in its history – one that reflects its civilization, values, and heritage,”...

In the fields outside Donetsk, Russian soldiers have started riding into battle on horseback. Not to move supplies, though they are using donkeys and camels for that. To assault Ukrainian positions. The drone kill zone near the front has made vehicle movement so lethal that mounted men galloping across open ground is now, by the grim math of the battlefield, a rational choice. Ukrainian drones find them anyway. Russian state media has praised the tactic as a historic return of the cavalry. That sentence would have read as satire in 2022. It is documented in footage from both sides in 2026,...

Operation Barkhane ended in August 2022. France withdrew from Mali, and with it went the West's primary counterterrorism architecture in the Sahel. Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM) and its Islamic State rivals exploited a vacuum created by a decade of Western strategic drift. They have since expanded southward along a threat corridor stretching from Mali to the Gulf of Guinea coastline. The West can no longer ignore the terrorism crisis in the Sahel; Western governments must implement more than weak bilateral strategies if they are to stop the spread. Operation Barkhane was not...

Following a series of escalatory tit-for-tat strikes last week, President Trump informed Congress on Friday that the war with Iran is back on. On Monday, Trump vowed to reinstate the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and impose a 20 percent charge on all cargo moving through the strait. This is the wrong move. If the ceasefire is dead and negotiations are at an impasse, then the U.S. should walk away from this pointless war, not double down on it. Trump should declare victory and be done with it.The previous round of fighting demonstrated that the U.S. is (thankfully) unwilling to use the...

Since the advent of social media, guardrails have been in place to deal with extremist content and helping prevent users from becoming radicalized. The removal of many of these safety mechanisms recently was based on arguments prioritizing freedom of speech over the damage done by excessive hate content. Algorithms' aggressive promotion of content stoking the worst impulses of an ever-growing number of radicalized individuals online – including some with mental health issues – has overtaken the guardrails that remain. What is currently happening online is no surprise to MEMRI...

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, only two months into his term, has a busy month of foreign engagements. In early July, he received the body of slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei which was visiting Iraq’s holy cities, Najaf and Karbala, before burial. Meanwhile, Zaidi and his team were earnestly preparing for his first official foreign visit to Washington, scheduled for only a week after the funeral, beginning on July 13. Ahead of his visit to the United States, Zaidi announced wins on two big priorities for Washington: militia disarmament and countering corruption....

Peter Zeihan is not actually an optimist or a pessimist. He is a geopolitical strategist who has spent the better part of three decades arguing that geography, demographics, and energy are the actual drivers of how the world works, and that most of what passes for foreign policy analysis is just people describing the furniture without understanding the house. He predicted a lot of what is happening right now. That is what this piece is about. In 2014, when he published The Accidental Superpower, the structural conditions pointed somewhere very specific. American geography gives it advantages...

Eighty-three years ago this month, Foreign Affairs published Sir Halford Mackinder’s last iteration of his “heartland” theory of global geopolitics titled “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace.” It is one of the most important, though least appreciated, essays he ever wrote, and it significantly modified the two earlier iterations of his global theory—“The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904) and Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). Far too many scholars and commentators on international relations invoke Mackinder by referencing his...

A wave of conservative electoral wins continues to sweep across Latin America, creating a strategic opening for the Trump administration to restore security and stability in America’s hemisphere. The most recent elections in Peru and Colombia are laying the stage for major U.S. inroads with the critical Andean region, which is a critical theater for determining the fate of hemispheric efforts on narco-terrorism, malign Chinese influence, and secure supply chains. Peru's president-elect, Keiko Fujimori, emerges from a decade of political turmoil with the promise to restore Peru’s...

More than 100 prominent citizens from India and Pakistan including former diplomats, academics, political leaders and members of civil society have jointly appealed to Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif to restore dialogue, diplomatic engagement and people-to-people contact. Their open letter arrives at a particularly difficult moment. Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours remain deeply strained following the 2025 military crisis, while diplomatic engagement, trade and public exchanges continue to operate at minimal levels. The appeal is significant not because it...

Today’s alliance politics, our assessments of the relationships between the U.S. and her allies, lacks cognitive empathy. And without empathy we retreat into caricature: the “Ugly American” on one side, the “sanctimonious free-riding ally” on the other. The Ugly American has long served as a moral cudgel, conjuring a loud, incurious hegemon, overconfident and underinformed, certain that power justifies preference. And yes, recent interventions by the United States have been poorly calibrated, its polarization has unnerved allies, and its leaders have lurched...

When people ask what Expo 2027 Belgrade is really about, I don’t reach for statistics first, though the numbers are compelling: 137 participating countries, more than four million expected visitors, 8,000 events across 93 days, all unfolding on 25 hectares beside the Sava River. What I offer is simpler than that. I tell them it is about the oldest truth in human experience: when people from every corner of the world come together to play, they connect. Our theme, “Play for Humanity: Sport and Music for All,” was not chosen lightly. In a world that often feels...