Opinion

  The European Union has never been homogeneous, but recent policy clashes and particularly the immigration issue are making its split into three sub-blocs — the North, the South and the East — increasingly visible. Two strongmen, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling party, make no secret of trying to create an axis for ...

  Faced with Russian nuclear threats during the Cold War, the strategist Herman Kahn calibrated a macabre ladder of escalation, with 44 different rungs ranging from “Ostensible Crisis” to “Spasm or Insensate War.” In the era of cyberwarfare that’s now dawning, the rules of the game haven’t yet been established with such coldblooded precision. That’s why this period of Russian-American ...

  In the mostly very positive report on U.S. income and poverty in 2015 that the Census Bureau released this week, there was one sour note. As the Wall Street Journal reported: Income gains were spread across nearly all age groups, household types, regions and racial or ethnic groups. One exception: Incomes didn’t rise for households living outside metropolitan areas. ...

  Most people will never glimpse the vast underwater mountains and canyons off Cape Cod that President Barack Obama designated as a national monument Thursday. The same goes for the hundreds of thousands of submerged square miles that the U.K., Ecuador, Costa Rica and other countries have just protected, and for the half-million square miles near Hawaii that Obama recently ...

Bratislava summit was meant to fast-track the European Union’s introspection and it seems to have served its purpose. Waking up from its complacency after Brexit, the 27 leaders’ meeting looked into ways to prevent the disintegration and dislocation that the bloc is facing. The EU is grappling with the greatest ever threat to its existence. And minus Britain, it is ...

  One of the hardest things for a foreigner to understand in U.S. politics, especially its rather extreme 2016 version, is the willingness of voters to support candidates they deemed unacceptable earlier in the campaign. Because the U.S. presidential election narrows to a two-candidate race, the calculus of voters and political operatives shifts in spectacular ways. Plenty of this was ...

  The financial crisis and the bailouts that followed unleashed a wave of populist anger, targeting almost everyone with power, from Wall Street to government officials to “elites” more generally. Except in one sector: technology. Why has tech been spared the torches and pitchforks? Because everybody loves a winner. As the economy began to grow again in 2009, it had ...

  For centuries, a harsh climate and ice-choked seas dashed the dreams of sailors attempting to cross the Canadian Northwest Passage between Asia and Europe. Now, thanks to climate change and reduced ice cover, the trip isn’t nearly so daunting. Last weekend, the Crystal Serenity, a luxury cruise ship, carried a record thousand-plus passengers and crew through the passage. Next ...

America is on the mend. Witness the good news in the latest version of the nation’s “economic report card”: the Census Bureau’s annual estimates of the median household income and the poverty rate. Here are the crucial numbers. In 2015, median household income — the midpoint, with half of households above and half below — rose 5.2 percent to $56,500 ...

  David Cameron’s political career arguably came to an end this week because of the U.K.’s longest-running policy debate. Not over leaving Europe, but over education. When he resigned as prime minister after the Brexit referendum in June, Cameron pledged to keep his parliamentary seat until 2020. On Monday, he decided he’d had enough and many concluded that the timing ...