The Best of 2015

Best of 2015 January/February 2015 Essay

Darkness Invisible

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...

Thomas R. Insel, Pamela Y. Collins, and Steven E. Hyman

Best of 2015 January/February 2015 Essay

The Calm Before the Storm

Instead of trying to predict "Black Swan" events such as coups or crises, forecasters should look at how political systems handle disorder. The best indicator of a...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton

Best of 2015 March/April 2015 Comment

The Failure of Multiculturalism

Multicultural policies accept that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. By forcing people...

Kenan Malik

Best of 2015 March/April 2015 Review Essay

The Resistible Rise of Vladimir Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vaunted “stability” has turned into spoliation. The methods he used to fix the corrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state have...

Stephen Kotkin

Best of 2015 March/April 2015 Essay

Obama's Libya Debacle

The U.S. intervention in Libya was a complete failure. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths there...

Alan J. Kuperman

Best of 2015 March/April 2015 Essay

ISIS Is Not a Terrorist Group

ISIS may use terrorism as a tactic, but it is not a terrorist organization. Rather, it is a pseudo-state led by a conventional army. So the counterterrorism strategies...

Audrey Kurth Cronin

Best of 2015 May/June 2015 Comment

The End of Reform in China

For decades, China's communist regime has defied predictions of its impending demise by using policy reforms to head off the need for fundamental institutional change....

Youwei

Best of 2015 July/August 2015 Essay

The Decline of International Studies

The United States used to have excellent international studies programs, which helped support the country’s diplomatic power and stabilizing global role. But as...

Charles King

Best of 2015 July/August 2015 Comment

Same as It Ever Was

From Frankenstein onward, the idea of intelligent machines has frightened us. Many today warn of great dangers coming from robots and automation, including...

Martin Wolf

Best of 2015 November/December 2015 Comment

The End of Pax Americana

Washington is indeed pulling back from the Middle East—not because it doesn’t care or can’t afford to do more, but because policymakers have recognized, correctly,...

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson

U.S. soldiers leaving Iraq, December 2011. The potential for American military power to effect major change in the Middle East is diminishing.

Best of 2015 Feb 20, 2015 Snapshot

China's Boyfriends for Hire

In China, the overwhelming cultural pressure for women to marry by the age of 27—especially intense around Chinese New Year—has led to a burgeoning rent-a-boyfriend...

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Best of 2015 Mar 22, 2015 Snapshot

Weed World

In the blink of an eye, global debates about cannabis legalization have shifted from “whether” to “how.” In 2014, Uruguay became the first nation to explicitly...

John Collins

A worker harvests cannabis plants at a plantation near Nazareth, May 28, 2013.

Best of 2015 Apr 15, 2015 Snapshot

Caliphate of Law

Debating whether ISIS is really "Islamic" or is better understood as an exotic apocalyptic death cult does not bring the world closer to understanding how the group...

Andrew F. March and Mara Revkin

A wall painted with the black flag commonly used by Islamic State militants in al-Alamm, March 10, 2015.

Best of 2015 May 10, 2015 Snapshot

The Balkans, Interrupted

With Macedonia facing its worst ever political crisis, with Bosnian unity at its most tenuous since the war, and with Kosovo witnessing a mass exodus of citizens who...

Edward P. Joseph

Visitors walk on an art installation inside a bunker near in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 24, 2015.

Best of 2015 May 22, 2015 Snapshot

When a Bride-to-Be Is a Bride to Buy

In India, a bride shortage has created such fierce demand for marriageable girls that bride trafficking is becoming a bigger business than ever.

Ira Trivedi

Best of 2015 May 31, 2015 Snapshot

There's Something About Marriage

There is something unseemly about a nation putting the civil rights of a historically oppressed minority to a popular vote. Most civilized nations would never conceive...

Omar G. Encarnación

People react as Ireland votes in favor of allowing same-sex marriage in a referendum, in Dublin May 23, 2015.

Best of 2015 Jul 7, 2015 Snapshot

A Pain in the Athens

We’ve never understood Greece because we have refused to see the crisis for what it was—a continuation of a series of bailouts for the financial sector that started in...

Mark Blyth

A Greek flag flies behind a statue depicting the European unity outside the European Parliament ahead of a eurozone leaders summit on Greece in Brussels, Belgium, July 6, 2015.

Best of 2015 Aug 10, 2015 Snapshot

Enlightened Despots, Then and Now

Setting aside that the Enlightenment did not end violence and self-destruction in the West (see: World War I, fascism, World War II, and the Cold War), calls for...

John M. Owen IV and J. Judd Owen

A man fixes a mosque's minaret with a crescent moon symbol in Jeddah, July 6, 2015.

Best of 2015 Oct 1, 2015 Snapshot

Putin's Syria Strategy

With all that could go wrong, Putin’s decision to intervene was probably fraught. Wary of overextension, the Kremlin must be trying to find the exact right balance...

Dmitry Adamsky

A Sukhoi Su-30SM jet fighter flies above a kite during an airshow outside Moscow, August 29, 2015.

Best of 2015 Oct 12, 2015 Snapshot

All in Good FON

By all appearances, the U.S. Navy is poised to begin Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea. Some believe that these operations would be a serious...

Mira Rapp-Hooper

Foreign Affairs Anthology Series