The World Watches America Play Tag With Itself By Diego Morales, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large NEW YORK—Across the marble lobbies of five-star hotels from Dubai to Davos, television screens flickered this week with the same surreal tableau: grown adults in suits sprinting across manicured lawns, frantically tagging one another while bellowing the words “You’re it, communist!” and…
Des Moines—capital of Iowa, epicenter of corn, and, improbably, one of the planet’s quietest geopolitical pressure points. To the casual foreign eye, it’s a fly-over city in a fly-over state, best known for butter sculptures and a state fair that looks like an agro-themed Coachella minus the drugs, the bands, and the will to live….
**The Accidental Diplomat: How a Virginia Congresswoman Became the World’s Accidental Weathervane** Abigail Spanberger, the CIA-turned-Congresswoman from Virginia, has become something of an international Rorschach test—everyone sees in her what they desperately want to believe about America’s future. To European diplomats sipping espresso in Brussels cafés, she’s proof that rational Americans still exist somewhere between…
The American Primeval Reboot: A Global Audience Watches Uncle Sam Re-Enact His Own Horror Movie By the time the term “American primeval” began trending in seven languages, it was no longer clear whether the United States was staging a historical reenactment or simply filming a live-action prequel to The Purge. From Berlin to Bangkok, the…
Peter Doocy: The Accidental Diplomat in America’s Theater of the Absurd GENEVA—In the marble corridors of the Palais des Nations, where interpreters swap apocalyptic climate reports in six languages before lunch, U.S. correspondents are usually filed under “local color.” Yet even here, among diplomats who’ve survived coup attempts and champagne shortages, the name Peter Doocy…
If you tune into CNN’s late-night election marathons, you’ll see Abby Phillip holding court with the unflappable calm of someone who has already mentally drafted three post-mortems for democracy and a grocery list. To much of the planet she is merely the poised Washington anchor who can call a race in Arizona while the rest…
**When the World’s Largest Economy Forgets to Pay the Electric Bill** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen This Movie Before* America, that shining city upon a hill, occasionally likes to switch off its own lights just to remind everyone it’s still the main character. While the rest of the planet scrambles to keep the fluorescent bulbs…
Minneapolis, that charming mid-Western city once famous for lakes, lutefisk, and the polite passive-aggression of its inhabitants, has once again elbowed its way onto the world stage with a shooting that left the hometown crowd sighing “not again” and the rest of the planet sighing “still?” Details remain as murky as the Mississippi in springtime,…
Howie Kurtz and the Global Gospel of Self-Reference By our jaded foreign correspondent who’s watched press corps on five continents eat their own tails If you zoom out far enough—say, from a café terrace in Lisbon or a newsroom in Lagos—Howard Kurtz looks less like an American media critic and more like a recurring weather…
North Dakota vs. Montana: A Prairie Cold War the World Pretends Not to Notice By “Marcel Dufresne,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which septuagenarian will control the nuclear football, a quieter, far more existential struggle has broken out on the high plains of the United States: North Dakota…
Ilhan Omar and Charlie Kirk: A Trans-Atlantic Spectacle of American Self-Parody By Dave’s Foreign Affairs Correspondent, still jet-lagged from a connecting flight through Doha’s duty-free dystopia If you squint at the latest Ilhan-versus-Charlie skirmish from a café terrace in Lisbon or a co-working pod in Nairobi, the whole thing looks less like politics and more…
Nadine Menendez and the Golden Handcuffs of Globalized Graft By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—If you want to understand how a New Jersey marriage certificate can rattle stock exchanges from Dubai to Davos, meet Nadine Menendez, née Arslanian, now the poster child for the idea that love, like subprime mortgages, can be…
