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Russia’s escalation of its eight-year war against Ukraine presents a choice about what role America would like to play in the world.

should the United States conduct itself as a great power, and, if so, should it be a European power or restrict itself to preserving the order in Asia.

Before the end of World War II, American statesmen began to think about what world order should look like after the war. They designed a global order to mirror four tenets of the American regime at home: commerce, law, liberalism, and guns.

Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.

A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.

But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home.

a broader understanding is needed of Dugin’s deadly ideas. Russia has been running his playbook for the past 20 years, and it has brought us here, to the brink of another world war.

A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past — infused with mysticism and obedient to authority — to explain a failed present.

The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people).

The human species Homo erectus evolved out of earlier human forms 1.8 million years ago and survived until 143,000 years ago. He and she walked on two feet and used tools and gradually spread over Africa and western and eastern Asia. Out of Homo erectus evolved, it is thought, Homo heidelbergensis. This common ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens existed from 400,000 to 350,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis used fire and was the first to build shelters as opposed to just finding shelter, although they did that too. The European branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into the Neandertals 300,000 or more years ago. The Neandertals were big-bodied, light-skinned, cold-adapted humans. Some, at least, were redheads. The African branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into Homo sapiens—us—200,000 years ago. We were slighter-bodied. We had narrower hips and darker skin

Homo sapiens began moving out of Africa to the Near East 40,000 years ago. There they encountered a southern remnant of Neandertals. Most of that species had long since gone extinct. But we shared the region for 15,000 years, until the Neandertals disappeared.

Contrary to previous suppositions and speculations, Neandertals ate a varied diet including not only large mammals like mammoths but also birds, rabbits, and seafood. They possessed the “language gene,” just as we do, and likely communicated in some sort of language. They manufactured tools, although not in as great a variety as we did. They decorated their bodies and wore jewelry—an index of symbolic cognition. They likely adorned themselves with feathers.

President Obama, in one of his most significant speeches since taking office, did not simply declare an end to the post-9/11 era on Thursday. He also offered a vision of America’s role in the world that he hopes could be one of his lasting legacies.

there are a multitude of hurdles to Mr. Obama’s goal of taking America off “perpetual war footing.”

Of all these threats, Mr. Rhodes said the White House was most worried about a surge of extremism in the wake of the Arab Spring. And yet the bloodiest of those conflicts, in Syria, reveals the limits of Mr. Obama’s policy.

Today, there are threats, but they tend to be regional, years away or limited in scale. None rises to the level of being global, immediate and existential. The United States faces no great-power rival. And this is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The biggest strategic question facing America is how to extend this respite rather than squander it. This will require restraining foreign involvement and restoring domestic strength. We can no longer seek to remake countries in the Middle East and South Asia, as was tried at great cost and with little success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This situation isn’t cause for complacency. Primacy is not license to do as we please. A respite is, by definition, temporary — a departure from history, not history’s end. It allows a shift of emphasis, not withdrawal from the world.

crimped construct leaves no room for the very different perspective of someone like architect Charles Kelley in Portland, Oregon

“Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

It was not until the union of Aragon and Castille and the completion of the reconquista that the large nation became fully committed to looking for new trade routes and colonies overseas. In 1492 the joint rulers of the nation decided to fund Christopher Columbus' expedition that they hoped would bypass Portugal's lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean reaching Asia by travelling west to reach the east.

Not every taboo or shibboleth has to be respected forever. Indeed, they should be inspected with some regularity

One of the nice things about being a great power is that you have a lot of choices

But in each of these choices the question is not really can we do it, or do we want to do it or do our values dictate we do it so much as 1) have we accurately thought through the potential costs and 2) are the costs sustainable in the face of the benefits we're trying to achieve?

In the eight hundred years since his death, people have sought in vain for the grave of Genhis Khan, the 13th-century conqueror and imperial ruler who, at the time of his death, occupied the largest contiguous empire, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. In capturing most of central Asia and China, his armies killed and pillaged but also forged new links between East and West. One of history’s most brilliant and ruthless leaders, Khan remade the world.

In 2012, President Obama lost college-educated voters by 4 points; this year, according to Public Opinion Strategies’ analysis, Clinton will win them by 29 points.

Clinton should make substantial gains among voters from households earning in excess of $100,000. While Obama lost these affluent voters in 2012 by 10 points, the NBC/WSJ survey shows Clinton carrying them by 12 points.

There are two groups among whom Trump will gain and Clinton will lose: voters making less than $30,000 and voters with high school degrees. Both less affluent groups are expected to increase their level of support for the Republican nominee over their 2012 margins, by 13 and by 17 points.

On news sites like this one, in newspapers, and even on TV, Americans have been grappling with concepts that normally don't get mentioned outside of a comparative literature class or liberal arts college symposium: neocolonialism, white man's burden, paternalism.

Maybe this is a conversation that started with the decline of the Iraq war. A February 2003 poll estimated that nearly 60% of Americans supported an invasion. By May 2007, 61% said the U.S. should have stayed out. The lessons were about more than the limits of American power or the wisdom of this particular conflict (although those are both important), but, underneath all of the questions and national soul-searching, the first hints in a century of American dominance that maybe our power isn't always and necessarily a force of good

during the two weeks of wall-to-wall American media coverage of the Egyptian revolution, hardly 10 minutes of cable news could go by without someone mentioning U.S. support for Mubarak. Americans were rooting for Egyptian protesters but, at the same time, they were helping to prop up Mubarak by participating in an American system that proudly promotes American hegemony by backing guys like him. The big contradiction in how Americans see our role in the world, obvious for so long to people in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was finally becoming clear to us.

Newt Gingrich, who led the field of Republican presidential candidates last week, argued that the concept of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is “un-American.” His rival Rick Perry, who led the Republican pack in September, answered a question about taxes and inequality by saying “I don’t care about that.”

This indifference is grounded in a proposition that has for decades dominated American debate over redistributive policies like steeper taxes for the rich: that inequality is an expected outcome of economic growth, and that efforts to tamp down inequality would slow growth down

As Mr. Gingrich put it, “You are not going to get job creation when you engage in class warfare because you have to attack the very people you hope will create jobs.”

The autocratic, pro-Western military government that took power in 1975 instigated limited economic liberalization. This enabled Bangladeshi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the Multifiber Arrangement, an international trade agreement on textiles and garments that placed export quotas on the emerging economies of East Asia in order to shield Western economies from competition. Very poor countries were exempt from the restrictions, and in the 1980s the new military elite of Bangladesh, hoping to capitalize on the cheap local labor, opened garment factories with the help of South Korean investors. Know-how soon spread, attracting more investment. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China.

because Bangladesh’s banking sector and stock market are “not very much exposed to the world,” Muhith explained, the country has weathered global financial crises well, holding a G.D.P. growth rate at an average of 5 percent since 1990.

The satellite towns that ring Dhaka — a maze of shoddy constructions and fetid streams — bring to mind William Blake’s dark Satanic mills, not equitable development. The leather industry has turned Hazaribagh, an area in Old Dhaka, into the fifth-most polluted place in the world, according to the environmental watchdog Blacksmith Institute. Yet industrialization is a proven step toward economic growth. According to the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, few if any countries have achieved first-world economic status without it.

In 2009, more voters turned out in the north than in any other region. Traveling is safer here than in other parts of the country, making it easier for voters to get to the polls. And for the winning candidate, good relations with northern power brokers will be crucial to forming a government with broad support.“That’s where the vast majority of the voters live,” said Jawid Kohistani, a political analyst based in Kabul, the capital. “Everyone is trying to secure votes in the north.”

For Abdullah Abdullah, another front-runner and the closest rival to President Hamid Karzai in the 2009 election, it is essentially home. Mr. Abdullah is half Tajik and half Pashtun, but politically he is most closely identified with the main Tajik political party in the north. Given that, and his bona fides as a veteran of the northern resistance to the Soviet occupation, he has a deep well of support in the region.

Mr. Ghani, meanwhile, has Mr. Dostum, who maintains a private militia and has been accused by human rights groups of ordering mass killings. Before naming him his first vice president, Mr. Ghani called him a “known killer.”

“The lesson-category within grand strategic history is that when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration, many leaders nonetheless respond with insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation. When the wolves of the world sense this, they, of course, will begin to make their moves to probe the ambiguities of the aging system and pick off choice pieces to devour at their leisure.

“This is what Putin is doing; this is what China has been moving toward doing in the maritime waters of Asia; this is what in the largest sense the upheavals of the Middle East are all about: i.e., who and what politico-ideological force will emerge as hegemon over the region in the new order to come. The old order, once known as ‘the American Century’ has been situated within ‘the modern era,’ an era which appears to be stalling out after some 300-plus years. The replacement era will not be modern and will not be a nice one.”

When Hill talks about the modern order he is referring to a state system that restrained the two great vices of foreign affairs: the desire for regional dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity

The luxury business is changing. As consumers have experienced what Bain & Company calls “logo fatigue,” growth for brands including Gucci, Prada and Vuitton has slowed.

The conventional wisdom was that consumers cared about obvious aspirational signifiers like name and price; the new view is that they now care about the less apparent marks of connoisseurship: handwork and craft

“If the 20th century was about manufacturing,” said Michael Burke, the chief executive of Louis Vuitton, “the 21st century will be about intangibles” — concern for preservation, heritage, the environment.

Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.

“You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,”

Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world

for decades now, the central banks of the world have been giving policymakers a false signal that sovereign debt is cheap and limitless. Functioning like monetary roach motels, central banks have become a place where Treasury bonds go in but never come out — thereby causing bond prices to be far higher and interest yields much lower than would obtain in a market that wasn’t rigged.

Indeed, the Fed and currency-pegging central banks in East Asia and the Persian Gulf have absorbed nearly all of Uncle Sam’s multitrillion-dollar spree of debt issuance. Moreover, about $4.6 trillion, or more than half of all debt held by the public, is now sequestered in central banks — paid for with printing-press money.

With the central banks no longer ready to buy, the Treasury market will once again be driven by real investors — many of them likely to demand higher interest rates owing to the heightened fiscal risks recently highlighted by Standard & Poor’s.

the basic argument is rather simple: that the health and nutrition of pregnant mothers and their children contribute to the strength and longevity of the next generation. If babies are deprived of sufficient nutrition in the womb and early in life, they will be more fragile and more vulnerable to diseases later on. These weakened adults will, in turn, produce weaker offspring in a self-reinforcing spiral.

Technology rescued humankind from centuries of physical maladies and malnutrition, Mr. Fogel argues. Before the 19th century, most people were caught in an endless cycle of subsistence farming. A colonial-era farmer, for example, worked about 78 hours during a five-and-a-half-day week. People needed more food to grow and gain strength, but they were unable to produce more food without being stronger.

“In many parts of the world, including the United States in the 20th century, medical advances appear to be at least as important as improvements in nutritional intake,”