Project Syndicate

By Chris Patten LONDON – I have read the obituaries of General Colin Powell, who died last week, with considerable sadness.

By  Masood Ahmed WASHINGTON, DC – Epidemiologists tell us that COVID-19 was not a “black swan.”

By Vinod Thomas SINGAPORE – Scientific evidence can now link specific weather disasters to human-induced climate change.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said that, “Whoever wills the end also wills…the indispensably necessary means to it that is in his control.”

By Mauricio Cárdenas WASHINGTON, DC – Earlier this year, the World Bank commissioned me and five fellow academics to develop recommendations on how to improve the methodology behind its annual Doing Business report, which ranked countries on the quality of their business regulations and their overall business environment.

By  Shashi Tharoor NEW DELHI – In the weeks since the Taliban’s theocratic terrorists returned to power in Kabul, the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women and girls, have been subjected to unimaginable suffering as the world’s attention turns to other issues.

BOGOTÁ – Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people around the world are declining at an unprecedented rate.

By Jorge G. Castañeda MEXICO CITY – Since the first days of Joe Biden’s presidency, his administration has insisted that the growing number of migrants being apprehended at the US-Mexico border is not a “crisis,” but rather a normal, seasonal spike.

By Chris Patten LONDON – The basic text making the case for an international-relations rulebook was provided by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE.

By  Joseph E. Stiglitz NEW YORK – Moves are afoot to replace or at least greatly weaken Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director since 2019.

CAPE TOWN/BERLIN – The northern summer of 2021 has brought a series of record-breaking natural disasters.

By Nina L. Khrushcheva MOSCOW – Thirty years ago this month, a group of communist hardliners seized control of Moscow and placed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his holiday home in Crimea.

By  Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking.

By Michael R. Bloomberg NEW YORK – Each year, more than 80,000 children globally die from a danger that gets little public attention and is not taken seriously enough by governments: drowning.

By Richard Haass NEW YORK – Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country.

By Håvard Halland and Günther Thallinger PARIS/MUNICH – Institutional investors are increasingly embracing the effort to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2050.

By  Jeffrey D. Sachs NEW YORK – The Group of Twenty has become a pillar of multilateralism.

By  Zhang Jun SHANGHAI – The great powers in history have tended to have one thing in common: size matters.

By Paul Gruenwald NEW YORK – Research into economic growth has a long and distinguished history, but the recent introduction of sustainability into the debate has given the field a necessary and overdue shake-up.

By  Josep Borrell and Paolo Gentiloni BRUSSELS – Multilateralism has been on the defensive in recent years.