Donald Trump will always tell you that he is a “great builder.” “You can go ahead and speak to the guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me,” he told me several years ago. “But the guys who know me know I’m a great builder.” A month before he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, Trump …

It’s telling that at the moment Jalal Talabani, the former Iraqi president and Kurdish revolutionary, drew his last breaths, Iranian tanks were amassing on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. In the Kurdish civil war of the 1990s, Talabani’s faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, aligned with Iran. The Iranians tacitly supported Kurdish independence. After the liberation of Iraq in 2003, …

Gee, thanks, boss! Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just made life a lot harder for Haruhiko Kuroda or whoever succeeds him as Bank of Japan governor. Whether Abe gives Kuroda a second term or not, the premier’s planned consumption tax hike fights the central bank’s efforts to rev up the economy and get inflation at least within shouting distance of …