Let’s imagine a Chinese ‘applied history’ project, similar to the one at Harvard’s Belfer Center that helped spawn Professor Graham Allison’s widely discussed book ‘Destined for War.’ Allison’s historical analysis led him to posit a ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and a dominant America, like the ancient conflict between Athens and ...

It could be a bond market correction, or the start of a rout, or the seeds of a full-blown tantrum. But it’s none of these. In Europe, it’s just overdone. The fixed-income selloff has missed the fact that nothing fundamental has happened on the economic data front, or even politically — we’ve just been talked at by central bankers getting ...

Clean coal, always dubious as a concept and never proved as a reality, has now failed as business proposition. Southern Co. has decided to stop work on a process that would have captured carbon dioxide emissions from a coal plant in Mississippi. Giving up on the project, which was nearly $5 billion over budget and three years behind schedule, makes ...