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In early June, Finns learned that a civilian had put in a bid for a property near a Finnish Defense Force test-shooting range in the town of Taipalsaari, located some 20 kilometers from the Russian border. At first, nothing seemed unusual about this; civilians often live near military shooting ranges. But there was one detail that triggered concern in the Finnish military and government: the prospective buyer was Russian.

Many have warned that even if a Iran accepts a nuclear deal, it will continue to develop nuclear weapons in secret. In reality, however, Iran simply doesn't have the capability to build the bomb without getting caught.

In a famous essay from 1969, the Anglo-Jewish liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between “two concepts of liberty.” The first concept, negative liberty, implies freedom from external coercion. “By being free in this sense, I mean not being interfered with by others,” Berlin wrote. The second concept, positive liberty, is more prescriptive. It asserts that freedom lies in self-direction and self-mastery.

Far from being a "First World problem", mental illness is a global scourge that affects people of all incomes and backgrounds. By 2030, mental disorders will cost the global economy around $6 trillion a year - more than heart disease.

In recent decades, most innovation has come from a single sector (information technology) and a single place (Silicon Valley). Walter Isaacson's The Innovators and Peter Thiel's Zero to One shed light on how that happened and what drives innovation more generally.

To make progress in Venezuela, the United States will have to work with its international partners to find a more moderate path forward.

After years of leadership by octogenarians, the Gulf Arab states are getting younger rulers. On February 10, the ruler of Dubai announced a new Emirati cabinet that includes eight new ministers with an average age of 38. The youngest appointee, appropriately heading the Ministry of Youth Affairs, is just 22.

Israel - at least the largely secular and progressive version of Israel that once captured the world’s imagination - is over. Although that Israel was always in some ways a fantasy, the myth was at least grounded in reality. Today that reality has changed, and the country that has replaced it is profoundly different from the one its founders imagined almost 70 years ago. Since the last elections, in March 2015, a number of slow-moving trends have accelerated dramatically.

Today’s China seeks not to marginalize competing groups and belief systems, the way Beijing did during the Mao era, but to co-opt them.

For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. By 1900, it was the world’s fourth or fifth-largest industrial power and the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

It remains too early to tell what the Trump administration’s overall strategy toward Asia will be. But three new books shed light on U.S. policy in the region, and how it might change under Trump.

On June 2, three North Korean restaurant workers who fled from their jobs in China arrived in South Korea. In April, another 13 restaurant workers made a similar escape. The workers were part of a North Korean initiative to earn cash for the regime when aid from the Soviet Union dried up and a massive famine struck in the 1990s. The regime continues to send its citizens to work overseas and bring in revenue for the state.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, many economists worried that even if the US economy improved, unemployment would remain high for years to come. Some warned darkly of a “jobless recovery.” Those fears have proved unfounded: since peaking at ten percent in October 2009, the US unemployment rate has fallen by half and is now lower than it was in the years leading up to the crisis.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which China has been transformed in recent decades. Between 1959 and 1961, tens of millions of Chinese starved to death in the Great Famine. Today, China boasts the world’s second-largest economy. The country has virtually eliminated severe poverty among its citizens, a burgeoning middle class thrives in ever-expanding cities, and hundreds of Chinese citizens have become billionaires. Human history offers no other socioeconomic shift of equivalent magnitude.

How to fix U.S. relations with the G.C.C.

After a quarter-century of failed negotiations with North Korea, the United States and South Korea need to tighten up a sanctions regime that is currently far too loose to hurt Pyongyang.

The international order must find ways to survive illiberal assaults from Russia, China, and, increasingly, populist revolutions among its leading members. Doubling down on U.S. dominance would be the wrong approach. It would be better to build a less hegemonic, more diverse system.

How the U.S. Supreme Court engages with the world.

The South China Sea is fast becoming the world’s most important waterway. As the main corridor between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the sea carries one-third of global maritime trade, worth over $5 trillion, each year, $1.2 trillion of it going to or from the United States. The sea’s large oil and gas reserves and its vast fishing grounds, which produce 12 percent of the world’s annual catch, provide energy and food for Southeast Asia’s 620 million people.

In Bangladesh, the Copenhagen Consensus Center has used cost-benefit analysis to compare the expected returns from alternative policies, allowing the government to improve its citizens’ lives by choosing the best ones. The approach may sound simplistic, but it has the potential to bring enormous benefits almost everywhere.