Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 41

Bulletproof glass distorts the diplomatic view

Several months ago, I found myself walking down an empty Tripoli street near midnight, looking for a taxi. I wasn’t alone — I was with two colleagues, one of whom was then living in Libya. But we weren’t especially well-protected. We didn’t have a bodyguard. We certainly didn’t have a gun.

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In Syria, Assad crosses the red lines

Aleppo was burning last week: On YouTube, you could watch the flames consuming the walls of the 600-year-old souk, the central landmark of one of the world’s oldest cities. If you looked further, you could also find film of what appears to be Syrian government planes strafing the city and a video made inside the ruins of the passport office in the heart of the historic center. Ominously, Human Rights Watch has documented at least 10 government attacks on bakeries in Aleppo — in other words, a...

In China, the only certainty is uncertainty

BEIJING

In Beijing last week, every conversation ended the same way. You could start off talking about art, or the stock market, or food. You could be sitting at a formal banquet or in somebody’s house. You could be chatting with a businesswoman in a chic dress or a bureaucrat in a gray suit — but sooner or later she or he would lean over and ask: Have you heard anything?

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Scotland’s civic pride and example

ABERDEEN, Scotland

In a month when you are probably spending too much time watching speeches beamed from Tampa and listening to “spontaneous” applause from Charlotte, let me take you away, just for a moment, to the Braemar Gathering: a day of bagpipe contests, footraces, games and parades, held every year in a remote Scottish village.

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Pussy Riot sentence brings dissent to the masses

“Topless Woman Cuts Down Kiev Cross for Pussy Riot.” That headline ran at the top of a South African Web site a few days ago, accompanied by a picture of a half-naked member of a radical feminist group, chainsaw in hand, protesting the two-year jail sentence a Russian court had just handed down to three punk rockers. Al-Jazeera had a tamer headline: “Russian punk rockers jailed for hooliganism.” The accompanying picture was also tamer, showing the three punk rockers in question preparing for...

Romney’s old-world view of ‘New Europe’

Ignore the gaffes. They’ll soon be forgotten, and they don’t matter anyway. The real problem with Mitt Romney’s trip to Europe wasn’t that he sounded less than convinced about the London Olympics or that he gave short shrift to Palestinian culture. The problem was that the very idea of this particular trip — where he went and who he met, at least in Europe — was based on an outdated and increasingly misleading narrative about U.S. foreign policy.

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Europe must face up to ongoing euro crisis

LONDON

Like the bass line in a pop song, the euro zone keeps pumping out bad news, even while the world is distracted by other themes. On a typical day this week — Tuesday, between 8a.m. and 3p.m. in Britain — one could learn that Moody’s, the rating agency, had just lowered its outlook on Germany from stable to negative; that there were “alarming signs for Italy in the bond markets”; that Spanish 10-year bond yields had hit a euro-era record high; and that the entire euro zone was suffering f...

In this election, pick your elite

I don’t know whether this was the intention — one certainly assumes so — but the handful of new investigations into Mitt Romney’s investment arrangements in Switzerland, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands have come at a particularly interesting moment in the U.S. electoral cycle. With four months to go, both presidential candidates are frantically drawing lines in the sand: Each is arguing that he offers American voters a clear and distinct choice on health care, immigration, taxation — a...

Greece’s political crisis persists

eleven days ago, the apocalypse did not happen. The Greek elections took place, and the radicals did not win. Syriza — the neo-Marxist, anti-austerity party whose members call one another “comrade” and whose policies include the creation of 100,000 new government jobs — did not get the most votes. New Democracy, the establishment center-right party, emerged victorious, though just barely. They formed a shaky coalition with two center-left parties and promised to push through the budget cuts t...

Euro 2012, Olympics are expensive ways to boost Europe’s mood

WARSAW

At the beauty shop on Grzybowska Street, the manicurist was glancing at her watch. Dressed in a red and white top, wearing red and white feather earrings, she’d been painting people’s fingernails red and white all day long. But now she wanted to finish — soon it would be time for the match. Was she going? Of course she was going. “Everyone I know is going!”

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