This Weekend’s Foreign Policy Must-Reads

Varoufakis, a mathematical economist with a modest academic reputation, had become a popular writer in Greece. When the snap election was called, he interrupted his professorship at the University of Texas, flew home to Greece, and launched a ten-day election campaign whose sole expense was the cost of gas for his motorcycle…Varoufakis was elected with a larger share of the vote than any other candidate, and he was named the finance minister.

The mistake made by the media all along has been to conclude that because Pope Francis can speak morally to a variety of issues we tend to think of as detached from moral reasoning (like economics, inequality, and property) that his authority is less limited than it really is. The truth is that Francis’s greatest ability outside the Church is his capacity to inspire, especially in those who don’t normally look to Catholic moral theology for their inspiration.

The smuggler will strap the items in a waterproof sack, swim across the river and bribe the guards on the North Korean border to let him pass into North Korea. These are guards that the smuggler has carefully built relationships with over time. Smuggling goods is highly punishable, and letting people pass through the North Korean border, rather than shooting them, could get the border guards killed instantly. But North Korea has become a country where money can solve any problem and can save lives.

I talked to Iranians in Tehran from across the political spectrum about “Death to America!” I pointed out that, throughout the decades of tension, no American has been recorded going into a church and shouting “Death to Iran!” Some Iranians downplayed the revolutionary mantra’s importance; others insisted it still has strong symbolic merit. But all of them—particularly senior Iranian officials educated in the United States—seemed befuddled about why it would ever impact the fate of the nuclear deal.

A world of bonds works only when the investors who buy the bonds are extremely nervous and wildly cautious…The bailout represented a transfer of wealth from the rest of the economy into the bond market — precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen. Now, in the moral hand-wringing over Greece and its failure to pay, we see that bondholders expect to be bailed out constantly, even when they were obviously culpable in failing to manage their own risk.