Bret L. Stephens

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El terremoto del lunes devastó la ciudad de Nurdagi en el sur de Turquía. Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

EuropaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Cada vida tiene una serie de fechas indelebles: el nacimiento de un hijo, la muerte de un padre, una tragedia nacional como la del 11 de septiembre.

Una fecha imposible de olvidar en mi caso es el 19 de septiembre de 1985.

Entonces era un niño de 11 años que vivía en Ciudad de México, y unos minutos después de las 7:00 a. m. iba de camino a la escuela. De pronto, la calle empezó a sacudirse; el auto se balanceaba de un lado al otro de la calle. Se sentía como si estuviéramos volando. Esto duró casi tres minutos.

En la escuela circulaba el rumor de que el centro de la ciudad había quedado destruido.…  Seguir leyendo »

Los mexicanos salieron a las calles el 13 de noviembre en manifestaciones contra los esfuerzos de AMLO para socavar el Instituto Nacional Electoral. Paola Chiomante/Reuters

MundoAmérica

En 2018, escribí una columna en la que describía al futuro presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, o AMLO, como una versión de izquierda de Donald Trump. Los lectores no estaban convencidos. La comparación entre los dos hombres, escribió una persona en los comentarios, “es absurda”. Otro dijo que la columna era “asombrosamente ignorante”.

Permítanme retractarme. AMLO no es solo otra versión de Trump. Es peor, porque es un demagogo y un operador burocrático más eficaz.

Eso volvió a quedar claro cuando los mexicanos salieron a las calles el 13 de noviembre en marchas contra los esfuerzos de AMLO para desmantelar el Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE).…  Seguir leyendo »

Gracias, Xi Jinping

MundoAsia

Estimado presidente Xi:

Por favor, acepte la gratitud y las felicitaciones de mi país ahora que inicia su tercer periodo como secretario general del Partido Comunista de China. Aunque quizá no sea obvio en este momento, creemos que su gestión será reconocida algún día como una de las grandes bendiciones inesperadas en la historia de Estados Unidos y de otras naciones libres.

Con algunas excepciones, en términos generales, esto no es lo que se esperaba cuando usted se convirtió en líder supremo hace 10 años.

Entonces, muchos en Occidente concluyeron que era solo una cuestión de tiempo para que China retomara su antiguo lugar como la civilización dominante y la economía más grande del mundo.…  Seguir leyendo »

Que comiencen las revoluciones de mujeres

EuropaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

¿A poco no sería apropiado si los regímenes en Moscú y Teherán —el primero definido por un culto al machismo de su líder, el segundo por su misoginia sistémica— fueran derrumbados por protestas inspiradas y lideradas por mujeres?

Esa posibilidad ya no es remota. Las protestas que se han desarrollado en todo Irán desde la muerte cruel de la joven de 22 años, Mahsa Amini —acusada de violar la ley de Irán sobre el uso del hiyab, arrestada por la polícia de la moral y que casi indudablemente golpearon hasta dejarla en coma mientras estaba detenida— son las más serias desde la Revolución verde de 2009 después de la reelección fraudulenta de Mahmud Ahmadineyad.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pelosi no podía retroceder ante China

MundoAméricaMundoAsia, , ,

La visita de Nancy Pelosi a Taiwán acarrea riesgos indiscutibles.

Pekín podría responder hostigando a los barcos y aviones de la Marina estadounidense en el área, con un claro potencial de choque o confrontación. Podría apoderarse de la isla taiwanesa de Kinmen —en buena medida desmilitarizada, y más conocida por los entusiastas de la Guerra Fría como Quemoy—, que se encuentra a solo unos cuantos kilómetros de la costa de Fujian. Podría ayudar a Moscú en la guerra en Ucrania, tal vez al venderle el tipo de municiones de precisión que, según los informes, se están agotando en el ejército ruso.…  Seguir leyendo »

La obra de Claggett Wilson Flower of Death — The Bursting of a Heavy Shell — Not as It Looks, but as It Feels and Sounds and Smells, circa 1919. Smithsonian American Art Museum

Europa, , ,

Por lo general se considera que la Segunda Guerra Mundial comenzó el primero de septiembre de 1939, cuando Hitler invadió Polonia después de la firma del Pacto Ribbentrop-Mólotov. Pero ese fue solo uno de una serie de acontecimientos que en ese momento se habría podido pensar que no tenían relación.

Entre ellos, la invasión de Manchuria por parte de Japón en 1931, la invasión de Abisinia por parte de Italia en 1935, la remilitarización de Renania en 1936 y la Guerra Civil española, que comenzó ese mismo año. La anexión de Austria y la Crisis de los Sudetes en 1938. La invasión soviética a Polonia algunas semanas después de la alemana y las invasiones de Alemania en el oeste el año siguiente.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ella sobrevivió el Holocausto y nos ayuda a ver lo que jamás debemos olvidar

ReflexionesSocial,

Cuando Buba Weisz Sajovits y su hermana, Icu, llegaron a Veracruz en 1946, su hermana mayor, Bella, las estaba esperando junto al muelle. Bella, quien había vivido en México con su esposo desde la década de 1930, les insistió que no hablaran sobre lo que les pasó en la guerra. La vida debía vivirse con miras al futuro, no al pasado.

Así que Buba —su nombre de pila es Miriam, pero siempre la han llamado por su apodo— vivió viendo hacia adelante. Se casó con otro emigrado sobreviviente de un campamento de concentración, Luis Stillmann, cuya historia relaté en un artículo el año pasado.…  Seguir leyendo »

A mural in Cairo in 2012 depicted President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and former ministers after he was deposed in the Arab Spring. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times

MundoOriente Próximo,

Ten years ago, as masses of demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, I made a modest bet with a friend that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator of nearly 30 years, would hold on to power. My thinking was that Mubarak controlled the army, and the army could see that the choice Egypt faced wasn’t between democracy and dictatorship. It was the choice among Islamism, chaos — and him.

I lost the bet, but I wasn’t entirely wrong.

Mubarak himself, of course, soon fell, raising broad hopes that decent, stable, representative democracy might yet establish itself not just in Egypt but throughout the Arabic-speaking world.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

If there’s one word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to The New York Times’s award-winning 1619 Project, it’s ambition. Ambition to reframe America’s conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history. Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly debate to national consciousness.

In some ways, this ambition succeeded. The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Siren Song of ‘One State’

MundoOriente Próximo

Amos Oz, the Israeli writer who was also a founder of the Peace Now movement, was once asked by a Norwegian journalist why Jews and Palestinians couldn’t just live as equal citizens in a single state. Oz countered by asking why Norway and Sweden couldn’t just merge into a single state, too, as they had been for most of the 19th century.

“Clearly, Mr. Oz,” the journalist replied, “you know nothing about the Swedes!”

I heard Oz tell this story many years ago, so it might have been a Swedish journalist talking about Norwegians. But the point is the same: If Norwegians don’t want to share a state with Swedes, if Scots may not want to share a state with the English, or Catalans with Spaniards, then how can anyone imagine Israelis and Palestinians, with rivers of blood between them, joining hands in a common political enterprise?…  Seguir leyendo »

Firefighters responding to a fire at the Chinese Consulate in Houston on July 21. Credit Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

MundoAméricaMundoAsia, ,

We’ll probably never know exactly what sorts of documents were incinerated at China’s Consulate in Houston in the days before the United States forced it to close on Friday, after accusing it of being a hub of espionage. We may also never know what caused this month’s catastrophic fire aboard the U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, a massive amphibious assault ship that was being fitted out to double as a small aircraft carrier, in the port of San Diego.

What we should know is that the two fires are actually one. We are racing toward a conflict with China we may be ill-prepared to wage.…  Seguir leyendo »

A statue of George Washington taken down by protesters in Portland, Ore. Credit Mark Graves/The Oregonian, via Associated Press

MundoAmérica,

Regarding statues, monuments, and other public tributes to those once deemed great — which to do away with and which to keep — four familiar words can guide our choices: a more perfect union.

Did Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee fight for a more perfect union? No. They fought for disunion. Outside of museums, grave sites, or private collections, there should be no statues of either man, or of their senior confederates.

Likewise, John C. Calhoun believed in slavery as a positive good and nullification as a state’s right. He utterly fails the more perfect union test, which is why Yale was right when in 2017 it rechristened the residential college previously named for him.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Xi Jinping of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday. Credit Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock

MundoAsia,

Great struggles between great powers tend to have a tipping point. It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differences becomes obvious to nearly everyone.

In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisis when it sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the First World War, “all the alarm bells throughout Europe began immediately to quiver.” In 1936 Germany provoked another crisis when it marched troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations. In 1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had no intention of honoring democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchill was left to warn that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”…  Seguir leyendo »

The Chinese government’s suppression of news about the coronavirus contributed to the severity of the health crisis. Credit Wu Hong/EPA, via Shutterstock

MundoAsia

Several years ago, in an overheated room in Beijing, I was forced to endure a stern lecture from a Chinese foreign ministry official. My sin: As the editor at The Wall Street Journal responsible for the paper’s overseas opinion sections, I had apparently insulted the entire Chinese people by publishing the work of a “well-known terrorist” — the courageous Uighur human-rights activist Rebiya Kadeer.

I had to clench my jaw to suppress the rejoinder that China’s best-known tyrant, Mao Zedong, has his portrait overlooking the killing field known as Tiananmen Square.

I thought of that episode this week on hearing Wednesday’s news that the Chinese government has decided to expel three Wall Street Journal reporters based in China — two Americans and an Australian — in retaliation for the headline of an opinion column by Walter Russell Mead, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinians protesting President Trump’s plan for Middle East peace. Credit Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

MundoOriente Próximo

Regarding President Trump’s peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the instant conventional wisdom is that it’s a geopolitical nonstarter, a gift to Benjamin Netanyahu and an electoral ploy by the president to win Jewish votes in Florida rather than Palestinian hearts in Ramallah.

It may be all of those things. But nobody will benefit less from a curt dismissal of the plan than the Palestinians themselves, whose leaders are again letting history pass them by.

The record of Arab-Israeli peace efforts can be summed up succinctly: Nearly every time the Arab side said no, it wound up with less.

That was true after it rejected the 1947 U.N.…  Seguir leyendo »

Qassim Suleimani in Tehran in 2016. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Reasonable people will debate the likeliest ramifications of President Trump’s decision to order the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Revolutionary Guards Corps commander whose power in Iran was second only to that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and whose power in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was arguably second to none.

What shouldn’t be in doubt is the justice.

By far the best account of Suleimani’s life was written by Dexter Filkins for The New Yorker in 2013. It’s worth reprising some of the details.

In 1998, Suleimani assumed command of the Quds Force — the Guards’ extraterritorial terrorist wing — whose prior exploits included a role in the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.…  Seguir leyendo »

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a campaign event on Wednesday. Credit Russell Cheyne/Reuters

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

Back when Donald Trump was running for president — and Republicans were still capable of feeling politically ashamed — a conservative friend made what was, to my mind, the decisive case against voting for him.

No, a ballot for Trump did not automatically mean that his voters shared his bigotries. Nor did it necessarily mean that they weren’t embarrassed by them.

It just meant that those bigotries weren’t deal-breakers. If their candidate was a birther, they could live with it. If he thought celebrity was a license for sexual predation, they could live with it. If he wanted to impose a religious test on immigrants; or discredit a judge on account of his ethnic background; or characterize the bulk of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” — that may all have been very unfortunate.…  Seguir leyendo »

A rally near the Place de République in Paris on Thursday, in support of the national strike in France. Credit Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

MundoAméricaEuropaUnión Europea,

The past three years have been hard ones for the United States, especially for anyone who cares about good governance, democratic decency and the fate of open societies.

But there’s been one bright spot: an economy that defies expert predictions by continuing to deliver jobs, growth, dividends and higher wages. We were reminded of this again on Friday, with news that the economy added 266,000 new jobs last month, bringing unemployment to a 50-year low.

That being so, maybe now is not the best time for Democratic candidates to suggest we turn ourselves into an economic facsimile of France.

That’s my way of reading a useful report from The Times’s Jim Tankersley, who on Thursday described the ways in which Elizabeth Warren and other progressives are trying to upend decades of economic thinking by insisting that sharp tax hikes on businesses and the wealthy would accelerate growth, not depress it.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Emmanuel Macron of France with President Trump in London on Tuesday. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

InternacionalOTAN

With the conclusion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary summit in London, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump thinks that most alliance members, starting with France and Canada, are a bunch of ungrateful and unhelpful freeloaders. Fair to say, also, that most of those members see Trump as an erratic, pompous, dangerous simpleton.

There’s no reason they both can’t be right.

The tone of the summit was set several weeks ago, when Emmanuel Macron gave an interview to The Economist, warning of the “brain death” of NATO and wondering whether the alliance’s mutual defense commitments still meant anything.…  Seguir leyendo »

Lyubov Sobol protesting in Moscow in August. Credit Polina Ivanova/Reuters

Europa

The Russian human-rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko once explained to me how Vladimir Putin’s machinery of repression works.

“It isn’t necessary to put all the businessmen in jail”, she said. “It is necessary to jail the richest, the most independent, the most well-connected. It isn’t necessary to kill all the journalists. Just kill the most outstanding, the bravest, and the others will get the message”.

Her conclusion: “Nobody is untouchable”.

That was in 2007, when Putin still cultivated an image as a law-abiding, democratically elected leader. But that fiction vanished long ago.

Boris Nemtsov, the leading opposition figure, was murdered in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015.…  Seguir leyendo »