What explains America’s hyper-ideological response to the Ukraine crisis? Less than a year before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, Washington had wrapped up two decades of lousy regime-change wars, waged in the name of planting “freedom” in that region’s inhospitable soil. There was, or seemed to be, broad agreement that liberal moralism in foreign policy stood discredited: It had destabilized whole swaths of the Middle East and North Africa and bogged down America and its allies in the region’s bloody and intricate enmities—and to what end?Yet now, a few months later, the United States and its NATO allies are once…

On August 15, 2022, more than 1 billion Indians will celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence from the British Raj. India’s democracy has been prefaced with innumerable adjectives—loudest, largest, and most enduring in the developing world. In many ways, it is also an “unlikely” democracy. Its deep-seated inequalities, high rates of poverty and illiteracy, sprawling geography, and linguistic diversity mean that India possesses few of the typical prerequisites for democracy that political theorists have enumerated. Yet seven-and-a-half decades later, India’s democracy remains intact. Today, while the political framework of Indian democracy remains firmly in place, fresh questions are being raised about…

On an age of accelerated mass disinformation, both Europe and the United States are struggling to balance the public good and individual rights like free speech. On Thursday, Europe took a step toward more censorship of the internet and social media. It published an updated Code of Practice on Disinformation that requires tech companies to disclose how they remove or block content they determine to be false or harmful. The new rules also call on the firms to form partnerships with fact-checking services and post “indicators of trustworthiness” on sites and posts. More than 30 companies – including tech giants…

Water is slowly emerging as yet another potential cause for dispute between Ankara and Tehran. As of late, the two neighboring states have been at loggerheads over a number of issues, including Syria and Iraq, where they have opposing interests. After years of quiet diplomatic juggling, the issue of transboundary water management is gradually taking center stage in the two countries’ relations, a development that could, in the medium run, have serious repercussions for regional security, not least because Tehran has started to frame it in national security terms. Last month, for instance, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and a number of Iranian…

Beijing: China has attacked the theory that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory as a politically motivated lie, after the World Health Organisation recommended in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is needed into whether a lab accident may be to blame. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also rejected accusations that China had not fully cooperated with investigators, saying it welcomed a science-based probe but rejected any political manipulation. He also reiterated calls for an investigation into “highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina” in the…