Tunku Varadarajan

3 weeks ago | wsj.com | Tunku Varadarajan

The small college doesn’t take federal money. Its president, Larry Arnn, argues higher education would be far better if no one did. As Donald Trump trains his guns on Harvard, the president of a small nondenominational Christian college in southern Michigan is licking his lips in anticipation of a battle royale that could redefine American higher education. Larry Arnn, 72, has been president of Hillsdale College since May 2000.

4 weeks ago | aei.org | Tunku Varadarajan

The most striking thing you can say about Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate in literature who died Sunday at 89, is that he was a great and exemplary Spaniard. It’s a compliment that will annoy many Latin Americans, adept as they are at whining about Spain—the colonial mother country—and ascribing to it all blame for the backwardness that the Latin Americans themselves have been unable to banish even after two centuries of sovereignty.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Tunku Varadarajan

Your browser does not support HTML5 video. 0:00Paused0:00 / 1:25The most striking thing you can say about Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate in literature who died Sunday at 89, is that he was a great and exemplary Spaniard.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Tunku Varadarajan

Your browser does not support HTML5 video. PlayingDonald Trump is shredding American trade policy—in real time. On April 2, which he deemed “Liberation Day,” he slapped almost the entire world with “reciprocal” tariffs: 10% for most countries and higher rates for the “worst offenders,” including 46% for Vietnam, 34% for China and 20% for the European Union. In effect, Mr. Trump also slapped tariffs on 10005, Wall Street’s ZIP Code, for America’s markets cowered in horror.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Tunku Varadarajan

Watching from the sidelines at Dartmouth College is Douglas Irwin, an economics professor. He knows more about U.S. trade policy than anyone alive, having written “Clashing Over Commerce” (2017), the first definitive economic history of trade since Frank Taussig’s “A Tariff History of the United States” (1931). In a Zoom interview, I ask what governments and businesses around the globe should make of Mr. Trump’s mercurial approach to trade and tariffs.