President Donald Trump has just fulfilled a campaign pledge to tear up the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement. By Eli Clifton.

Rep. James Bridenstine’s nomination is already controversial. Evidence of self-dealing won’t help matters. By Nick Schwellenbach, Adam Zagorin.

Napoleon, with his aggrandizing bulletins and heroic portraits orchestrated down to the smallest detail, was a master of self-promotion. By Nina Martyris.

Authoritarians are on the rise, and electorates are seduced by extremes. To fight back, mainstream politicians need to grasp the causes of popular discontent and rebuild democracy’s moral foundations. By Yascha Mounk.

Evo Morales’s new allies are political alliances, and they lack the revolutionary fervor of his old ones. By Jessica Camille Aguirre.

From the beginning of his political career, Donald Trump has shown an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in people, often to his own advantage. By Julius Krein.

We watched the State of the Union so you wouldn’t have to. By Doktor Zoom.

Nicholas Kristof wonders if Trump is our first president with autocratic tendencies. Where has he been for the past 15 years? By Matt Purple. (Jan. 19, 2018)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition is irrational, bordering on messianic.

Reflections on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin from the writer Masha Gessen, whose new book about Russia won the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction. By Adrienne LaFrance.

What Robert Mugabe’s long and eventful life can teach us. By Elsie Eyakuze.

Americans who support net neutrality find that their voices don’t count for much. By Jon Brodkin.

A photojournalist facing a criminal trial on several felony charges sounds like something that would happen in another country. So this article is written in the style that would be used if it did. By Ryan J. Reilly and Christopher Mathias.

Saudi Arabia has all the advantages in its rivalry with Iran — and still falters at every step. By Murtaza Hussain.

The problem in resource-rich states is that corruption is not marginal to political power, but central to acquiring it and keeping it. By Patrick Cockburn.

Faced with a vast, decaying empire, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II ruled with an iron fist, curtailing press freedom, promoting Islam and severing ties with the West. His similarities with Turkey’s current president have not gone unnoticed. By William Armstrong.

Declaring it all so ghastly isn’t going to halt these trends or remove the reprobate from the White House, writes Thomas Frank.

Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee. By David G. Savage.

Never mind the obvious factual differences in the stories—the allegations of Russian collusion are far more grave—American law, politics, and journalism is far too different now to think that matters will unfold the way they did in the 1970s. As complex a story as Watergate was, it reads like a children’s book compared to what Mueller and his team are dealing with. As vicious and as partisan as the events were back then, they seem quaint in comparison to the poisonous atmosphere in which the current scandal is unfolding. That is why the comparisons to Watergate are so facile. By Andrew Cohen.

For those of us who study Appalachia's politics, Trumps popularity comes as no surprise.Appalachia has long existed outside the economic norms of the United States... By Joshua Wilkey. (Oct. 18, 2017)