President Donald Trump’s threat to exercise a US “military option” in Venezuela was irresponsible not because it was unrealistic, although it was, or because it reinforced that nation’s tottering autocracy, although it did. The lasting damage of Trump’s words may be to the US relationship with Latin America. For the first time in more than a decade, some of the …

In a sense, President Donald Trump threaded a rhetorical needle last week explaining why he will prolong the war in Afghanistan that he had opposed as a candidate. America will no longer fight for girls’ schools and democracy. Instead, it will fight to destroy terrorists. “We will not dictate to the Afghan people how to live, or how to govern …

Most academic models of international trade are pretty simplistic. Some of these models are surprisingly effective for making certain types of predictions—for example, economists are very good at predicting how much different countries will trade with each other. But they’re not so good at predicting what kind of things the countries will specialize in, which country will have a trade …