Angela Merkel urged Harvard graduates Thursday to “tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness” in a speech laced with apparent jibes at Donald Trump and his policies. Though she did not name the U.S. president, the German chancellor devoted much of her Harvard University commencement speech to attacking major pillars of Trump’s presidency: protectionism, trade wars and building walls. She also warned of the “threat climate change poses to our planet’s resources” and called for the world to work together. Trump announced in 2017 that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. The German chancellor began…

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a bill Tuesday that, if enacted, would call for sanctions on the Chinese government and select individuals over the mass imprisonment of potentially millions of Muslims in concentration camps in eastern Xinjiang province. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under Xi Jinping, has building hundreds of “re-eduation centers” that it claims are “vocational training” facilities for Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities. Those who have survived them call them “concentration camps” – locations where they are taken by force to learn Mandarin, renouncing their Muslim faith, memorize communist propaganda songs, and engage in slave labor.…

Nationalism has a bad reputation today. It is, in the minds of many educated Westerners, a dangerous ideology. Some acknowledge the virtues of patriotism, understood as the benign affection for one’s homeland; at the same time, they see nationalism as narrow-minded and immoral, promoting blind loyalty to a country over deeper commitments to justice and humanity. In a January 2019 speech to his country’s diplomatic corps, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier put this view in stark terms: “Nationalism,” he said, “is an ideological poison.” In recent years, populists across the West have sought to invert this moral hierarchy. They have proudly claimed the mantle of…

AsTANA, Kazakhstan—For the past two years, the organization Atajurt Eriktileri (“Homeland Volunteers”) has been on the front lines of documenting and raising awareness about the mass detentions in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Atajurt is a Kazakhstan-based organization of volunteer activists and family members who have lost relatives to China’s crackdown on mostly Muslim minorities, principally Uighurs but also ethnic Kazakhs and others. The group’s office in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, has become one of the few windows into a sealed region for international journalists and organizations by hosting regular press conferences and posting video testimonies of recently released detainees from Beijing’s…

On Feb. 1, the Trump administration made good on its threats and began the official withdrawal process from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia. As others have pointed out, this was a short-sighted decision. By withdrawing from the INF Treaty, the Trump administration has eliminated any consequences of Moscow’s alleged noncompliance, leaving it free to deploy as many intermediate-range missiles as it wants. U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to throw out the rulebook instead of trying to enforce it greases the wheels for a return to U.S.-Russian nuclear arms racing—with potentially dire consequences for…