Project Syndicate

By Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – Wall Street hedge funds and lawyers have turned an arcane procedure of international treaties into a money machine, at the cost of the world’s poorest people.

MOSCOW – In her 2014 book Putin’s Kleptocracy, the late Karen Dawisha argued that the key to understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia is money.

By  Jorge G. Castañeda MEXICO CITY – Events in Bolivia remain exceptionally fluid following the ouster of President Evo Morales.

NEW YORK – The climate crisis and the 2008 financial crisis are two sides of the same coin.

By Kenneth Rogoff SOUTH BEND – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at least half right when he recently told the United States Congress that there is no US monopoly on regulation of next-generation payments technology.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – The worst foreign-policy decision by the United States of the last generation – and perhaps longer – was the “war of choice” that it launched in Iraq in 2003 for the stated purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction that did not, in fact, exist.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz NEW YORK – At the end of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a celebrated essay called “The End of History?”

By Simon Johnson WASHINGTON, DC – Since the end of World War II, the United States dollar has been at the heart of international finance and trade.

By Emma Navarro OSLO – The Earth’s oceans face many threats, none of which have quick fixes.

By Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI – Until recently, Indians had gotten used to taking economic growth for granted.

By Shlomo Ben-Ami TEL AVIV – US President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, clearing the way for a Turkish offensive against the Kurds, is an unconscionable betrayal of a strategic ally.

By  Bertrand Badré and Antoine Sire PARIS – Four years after world leaders signed the Paris climate agreement and adopted the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global environmental crisis shows every sign of worsening.

By Dani Rodrik CAMBRIDGE – In Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds, an American bomber pilot crashes his plane in the Arabian desert and is stranded among the locals in a nearby refugee camp.

By William Bruno and Todd Schneberk LOS ANGELES – In a stuffy attic-turned-office in Tijuana, Mexico, Juan (his name has been changed to protect his identity) described the harrowing events that drove him to flee his home in Guatemala, travel thousands of miles by foot, and request asylum in the United States.

By Yuen Yuen Ang ANN ARBOR – Since Chinese President Xi Jinping launched his sweeping anti-corruption campaign in 2012, more than 1.5 million officials, including some of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top leaders, have been disciplined.

By Marina Silva BRASILIA – The Amazon rainforest will survive only if the will to preserve it is stronger than the desire to burn it down.

By Ricardo Hausmann CAMBRIDGE – Is there such a thing as too much sanctity?

By Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI – Amid much fanfare, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has completed a hundred days of its second term.

By  Martin Rees CAMBRIDGE – Biomedical advances in recent decades have been hugely beneficial – most of all for the world’s poor, whose life expectancy has increased dramatically.

By Jayathma Wickramanayake NEW YORK – When I was a bright-eyed eighth grader in my native Sri Lanka, I couldn’t wait for my first sex education class.