Ned Temko

6 days ago | csmonitor.com | Ned Temko

A “hinge moment of history.”That is how Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described the dramatic shift in world politics that helped him win his come-from-behind election victory last week. Yet he could also have been describing three other democratic elections that have followed in quick succession in the past few days: in Britain, Australia, and Romania. They are all part of a battle over the future shape of democracy worldwide, framed by two key questions.

1 week ago | csmonitor.com | Ned Temko

If there were job ads inviting nation states to apply for work, it is not hard to guess which post would top the world’s search list, 100 days into Donald Trump’s second presidential term. “Help wanted,” the ad would read. “Leader of the free world.”President Trump has delivered a series of hammer blows to an international order that America largely built, buttressed, and led in the decades after World War II.

2 weeks ago | csmonitor.com | Ned Temko

It was a tantalizing promise, delivered with Donald Trump’s trademark panache: As dealmaker in chief, he would quickly end world conflicts that had defied his predecessors and their nattily dressed legions of career diplomats. Nearly 100 days into his second term as president, though, he is facing serious complications as he tries to unravel three major crises: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and Iran’s accelerating progress toward nuclear weapons.

3 weeks ago | csmonitor.com | Ned Temko

So much is changing, so jarringly, in America’s relations with China that it’s easy to overlook another equally dramatic diplomatic shift that could well decide how and when their tariff war ends. It involves relations not with America’s main rival power, but with its friends.

1 month ago | csmonitor.com | Ned Temko

Only one tumultuous week elapsed between President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on the White House lawn and a sudden change of course. But the question now preoccupying U.S. trading partners worldwide, despite huge relief over the 90-day “pause” announced Wednesday, is whether he has changed his mind. Not about tariffs, clearly his geopolitical instrument of choice. Nor about America’s main trade nemesis under successive administrations: China.