For more than a century, politics in the Western world has largely been a battle between liberals and conservatives. Now, that seems to be changing. Increasingly, the opponents are globalists and nationalists – and the groups cut across the old liberal vs. conservative lines. In the United States, Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan are globalists; Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (at least partly) are nationalists. In Great Britain, David Cameron and most of the Labor MPs were for staying in the EU (a...

If you are following the 2016 election closely—as I am—you might wonder if there are any issues at stake. Most of the commentary among political pundits seems to be about personalities and temperament. We hear a lot about how Trump voters are angry or Sanders voters are idealists. The Establishment candidates (Hillary and Kasich) stick to their party lines: Supreme Court nominees, paid family leave, equal pay for women for Democrats and lower taxes, less regulation, repeal of Obamacare for Repub...

        The events surrounding the war in Syria and global terrorism unfolded last week as if they had been choreographed. French President Hollande announced that he was visiting Washington to consult with President Obama and then would visit Moscow to see Putin, in an effort to create a united front against ISIS. Just hours before the Hollande Obama meeting, two Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian fighter jet, and Turkey claimed it had violated Turkish airspace – for 17 secon...

         The Obama Administration’s strategy in Syria keeps shifting. Last week, John Kerry announced that Iran would be included in Syrian peace talks in Vienna and that the UnitedStates would not insist that Bashar Assad step down as a condition of a peace settlement – both moves represent serious shifts in the US position. At nearly the same time, the Defense Department announced that 50 US Special Forces troops would be dispatched to northeastern Syria to aid Syrian ...

Joseph Stiglitz is, along with Paul Krugman, one of America’s foremost liberal economists. He is a Nobel Prize winner, a former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors under Bill Clinton, former chief economist at the World Bank and professor at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and now at Columbia. Although a staunch liberal – and as we know, economists, like judges, come in either liberal or conservative flavors – Stiglitz normally maintains a civilized demeanor in debate with his...