Opinion

During his trip to Asia recently, US President Barack Obama took the opportunity to tell an audience in Vietnam why the Trans-Pacific Partnership is so important. Since the Vietnamese people may be the greatest beneficiaries of the agreement, this was an excellent venue to praise the power of globalization to bring about shared prosperity to people around the world. But …

WASHINGTON The West is suffering from what one leading strategist calls an “autoimmune disease” in trying to fight the IS. The self-defense mechanisms championed by Donald Trump and his European neo-populist counterparts have gone into toxic overdrive — weakening the West’s body politic and making the extremism fever far worse. David Kenning, a British counter-radicalization expert, made this provocative argument …

  China’s endeavours to spread its wings over South China Sea is causing tremendous alarm and tension among neighbouring states which view Beijing’s encroachment towards their sovereign regional waters as an outright use of force to commandeer their regional coasts. Given its strategic location, China, the world’s second largest economy, claims large swathes of one of the world’s busiest shipping …

Kevin J. Ryan SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS F acebook already knows a lot about you—just look at the people in your “suggested friends” section or the carefully selected advertisements that seem to correlate pretty nicely with your recent browsing history. But the social network wants to get a whole lot smarter. That’s according to a blog post on Wednesday announcing …

As soon as the inaugural festivities are over, President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s administration will begin preparing for one of the most important diplomatic events of his presidency: the 2017 Philippine chairmanship of ASEAN. Not only will the occasion be significant for the country, it will also be milestone for the organization, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding during …

In the past few years the rhetorical back and forth between China and the United States over economic institutional governance has intensified. Along with concerns over the governance of multilateral development banks and the role of China’s currency in the International Monetary Fund, free trade agreements (FTA) have become part of a war of words over the future of the …

  Michael Froman When the winds of change blow, a Chinese proverb says, some people build walls and others build windmills. Given the tremendous environmental challenges the world faces, it’s not enough just to build windmills. We need to develop a range of innovative environmental technologies, and we need to break down barriers to trading them worldwide. Global trade in …

Sharing economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have been struggling as some European countries attempt to regulate and make sense of their business. The European Union has finally come up with some guiding principles for its members, mildly telling them that the “collaborative economy,” as the bureaucrats call it, is generally a good thing that shouldn’t be banned. The …

I don’t know whether a President Donald Trump would be able to destroy U.S. democracy by crushing the institutions that share power with the executive. I tend to agree with Brian Beutler that the institutions Trump might go after would fight back effectively — though I’m not eager to test that proposition. Nonetheless, I think Trump is dangerous to democracy …

  Adam Minter Indonesia is drowning in plastic trash. Bottles pollute its beaches, bags congest its waterways and instant-noodle cups overflow its garbage bins. It’s only getting worse: By 2019, Indonesia will generate about 5 percent more trash than it did in 2014, and about 15 percent of that will be plastic. Fixing this problem has become a priority for …